Chelsea Wolf, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, reviewed Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (Harper), which is among the final five selections in the category of Autobiography for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

I want to tell you about my skin or rather, the scars that pepper my skin. I haven’t been able to stop talking about them, writing about them, and photographing them since I read Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay. My wounds are self-inflicted, but not in the way that you think. They’re the result of 20 years of picking at the little red bumps, otherwise known as chicken skin, that riddle my body. Picking at myself started as a kind of self-soothing after my father left and eventually morphed into a way of saying, “You marked me and now I want to mark myself even worse.” They are a way of letting people know that while I can’t always say what happened to me, I can wear it on me always. Or, in the words of Roxane Gay, “I am going to keep telling them even though I hate having the stories to tell.”

Hunger has been described as brutal and it is a beautifully brutal read. In just over 300 pages, Gay ruthlessly takes the reader through the events of her childhood that led to her significant weight gain, the subsequent dieting- weight loss - weight gain cycle she has been in for over 20 years, and the ways in which she moves through a world that is not only made for thin people but hates fat people.

At the age of 12, Gay was gang-raped by a group of boys, including a popular boy she loved and trusted. Not wanting to bring her shame to her parents, hard working Haitian immigrants, she turned to food. “I was hollowed out. I was determined to fill the void, and food was what I used to build a shield around what was left of me.”

Soon after, she entered a private high school in New Hampshire, away from the watchful eyes of her parents, where she gained 30 pounds in two and a half months. During the summers, she would attend weight loss camps or subsist solely on liquid diets, always at the suggestion of her well-meaning parents. She would return to school thinner and to praise from her classmates, only to be overcome with anxiety about the dangers of her shrinking body. Always she would gain all of the weight back and then some. This cycle continued into her college years, even when she left Yale in her sophomore year to move to Arizona with a man she met on the internet during what she describes as her “lost year.”

At her heaviest, Gay weighed 577 pounds. She discloses this number early in the book with a frank honesty, as if to say, “now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…” She has succeeded in making her body a “fortress,” a “cage.” Gay convinces herself that if she makes herself as big as possible, she will no longer be attractive to men, thus keeping her safe.

Interspersed with her own story of her “unruly body” are observations on how women are taught to hate their bodies from a young age. Between the celebrity endorsed weight loss commercials, the idea of the “revenge body,” and gossip magazines criticizing or praising women based on their weight, women are inundated with the notion that what we are is never enough, even when it is too much.

Hunger is not your typical survivor story. Even the title, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, alludes to the fact that this story isn’t hers alone. Gay doesn’t consider herself a survivor, instead preferring the word victim, explaining, “I don’t want to diminish the gravity of what happened. I don’t want to pretend I’m on some triumphant, uplifting journey.” I sat with this explanation for a while, rolling the words around on my tongue before swallowing, hard. The way one does with the truth.

Gay lays herself bare in a way that most writers aren’t capable of doing. It is not just a memoir about the body but about the ways we learn to protect ourselves after trauma. At one point, Gay wonders about the person she would have been if the day in the woods had never happened. “When I imagine this woman who somehow made it to adulthood unscarred, she is everything I am not.” And that’s the scariest thought, isn’t it? To imagine who you could have been without your trauma?

Roxane Gay gave me permission to look at parts of my life and say out loud, “this is not okay.” She gave me permission to imagine a life where I don’t need to tear my own skin apart in order to not feel my father’s hands on it.

What Roxane Gay has achieved in writing “Hunger” is not only taking back her body, her story, but giving a voice, or some sense of courage, to other struggling women, both survivors and victims. We are all trying our best, to rewrite our story not for what it isn’t but for what it is, one body, one scar, one truth at a time.

Chelsea Wolf is a writer and musician living in New York City. She is an MFA candidate in Nonfiction at The New School. When she is not working on her memoir, she enjoys short walks on the beach (weak ankles), binge-watching "Law & Order: SVU,” and wrangling feral cats. Performing under the name Noie, she recently released the EP “Blue Devil Fits,” which can be streamed at SoundCloud.com/Noiemusic. Her musings can be found on Twitter @ChelsWolf

Mika Bar-On Nesher, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Ludmilla Petrushevskaya about her book The Girl From the Metropol Hotel: Growing up in Communist Russia (Penguin), which is among the final five selections in the category of Autobiography for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

The Girl from The Metropol Hotel is a thin book, but contains an unspeakable terror: the collective memory of Russia during WWII and the turbulent decades that followed. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s family belonged to a long line of prominent Bolsheviks who were labeled “Enemies of the State” during The Great Purge. They were brutally murdered. Cast out of the luxurious Metropol Hotel, a former Bolshevik headquarters, the few remaining women of Petrushevskaya ’s family were stricken with political stigma and forced into the darkest outskirts of Soviet society. It is in this setting we encounter the voice of the young Ludmilla, a child who not only survives but possesses the power to make the terror beautiful with her unique imagination.

Today Petrushevskaya lives in Moscow, at seventy-nine-years-old she is famous for her paintings, books, and more recently a career as a cabaret singer. Her courage and resilience have helped an entire generation of war children express what was mute and unspeakable. The book shows a young girl who never gives up her power, never checks the resonance of her powerful voice. As a child she was a political outcast, but the power of her genius kept her intact. She never cared about publishing or fame, yet she has been a consistent pillar, always herself, forever attuned to finding the beauty in any setting and the truth in every story.

Translated by Angela Fox &Christopher Jeffrey

Mika Bar-On Nesher: What was your artistic process like when working on this book? How did you find writing a memoir different from writing short stories?

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya: I wrote that book - as it happened - when my aunt Vava was dying. She was 93 years old and it was her first time in a hospital. She was very upset there. I, too, found myself beginning to die. I couldn’t eat. I lost 14 kilograms during the time of her gradual deterioration. Every single day, I was writing The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, and I was feeling such guilt, that at nine-years-old, I had run away from them with my grandmother. Vava had already completely lost her memory, and I visited her to put her to sleep. Together with the nurse, I changed her clothes, tucked her in, mumbling to her, as a mother to a child, despite knowing that she didn’t understand anymore. And suddenly, she wriggled out(slipped out) with some strength and kissed my hand. And I thought, that I would never let her read my book.

A writer doesn’t control his or herself - I don’t, in any case. I have the impression, that from the first moment of a work, the entire text is already sitting in my head, from the first to the last word. So this type of process that you’re asking me about doesn’t depend on me. I don’t control this dictation. It comes all on its own. It’s up to you to catch it and write it down. That’s why I always carry a notebook and pen with me. One time, a story came to me, but I was on the metro, in a crowd. And I didn’t have a pen. I arrived home, but to my complete despair, the story had gone. Only the following day, already at work, I went to the library, and by sheer willpower, knowing the story’s content, I forced it back. But it was already a different version. The poetry was gone. The rhythm was gone, the intensity, the word order, that can only be brought on by inspiration. By the way, one critic wrote that if stories match with their rhythms, then they are vers libre… but I thought in response, that’s a very long vers libre. You know, I very rarely edit a written text. I believe that it has been dictated to me as it’s meant to be. It can overtake me anywhere - on the street, on the train, in a store. Besides, as a rule, every tale is a true story. It’s true, the characters do not recognize themselves, I crucially change the surrounding circumstances. Regardless of whether the text is magical or far removed from reality - like in the book There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby, for which I received the World Fantasy Award in the USA in 2009. All the things in that book were also written down instantly, at once. When I was raising my children, in the neighboring room lay a sick mama, and so I got to work, right away. Now, I live alone and time has started to drag. I’ve almost finished two books, but I wait for the right moment to finish them. The finale of one of them, by the way, is inspired by a James Bond film.

MB: You are one of those rare artists who possess the ability to express yourself in writing, music, and painting. What is the limit and benefit of each medium for you? What can come across in a song that cannot be expressed in a story; how is the process of painting in private particular and distinct from that of performing in front of an audience?

LP: I draw constantly on a scrap of paper or in the notebook that I’m writing in. These sketches - just hand movements, some sort of profiles, and then it appears to me - I seem to be making up some sort of stories with these characters. This is how many children behave, they draw, they create and compose. But serious work - watercolors, illustrations for my books, comics, cartoons, portraits, pastels, engravings - for these endeavors it takes a whole day, or even a week, when I cannot spend time on anything else. Over the last few years, I started to sell my work, to raise money to support disabled orphans whom I take care of. Harvard University’s library has purchased 21 of my works, and the proceeds support these children.

As far as the concerts, it seems, I am a born actress, who sings for morsels of bread (like Edith Piaf). This ability to stand before people and sing has long sustained me. I performed on school and university stages. And I even earned acceptance at the Conservatory, since my youth I developed a strong voice with a three-octave range. The concerts were held in grand halls, and from those experiences emerged my passion for being in front of an audience. But I stopped making appearances. Then, I only sang songs for children - or in the summer in the fields when no one could hear me. But I was always singing at home, sitting at the piano, when no one was around. Mainly French chansons. I recorded myself with a tape-recorder, then I’d listen. I’d erase it, and record again. I was trying to sing in my own way somehow. I taught myself on my own. After all, in private singing, you don’t need a strong voice. More important, you must find your own style, your own individuality. And suddenly, again I returned to the stage at 69 years old. It was World Theater Day, and we were celebrating in a small cafe; after all, I am a well-known playwright. Everyone came - my actors, directors, my fans and students. And I decided among these acquaintances and dear listeners to sing four songs in French. I was, all the same, terrified. But as I began to sing, I suddenly realized, that the joy of the audience was beginning to move me - to my left and to my right, we were all together in the music! All of us! At that moment, my fear left me, and in its place, happiness arrived - I returned to the stage and began to give concerts, I assembled my own musicians and formed the Kerosene Orchestra.

I began to compose my own songs. Waking up in the morning, already fully formed melodies sounded in my head. Ability arises in a person when it is needed after all… and writing the words to a song, that I could do. I am a poet, I’ve filled books with verses. Above all, I began to write songs like monologues, like little one-woman shows. Mostly about lost love. Of course, there are lots of songs about that.

I’ve toured all of Russia with my concerts. I’ve sung in New York (at the Russian Samovar), in Sao Paulo, London, Paris, in many European cities. I not only sing, but I read my rather amusing poems. I design my own hats, rings, dresses. I do my own makeup. The stage - it’s such a joy. And I consider my show to be my very own.

MB: Were there specific fictional characters that inspired you and shaped your worldview as a child? How do you think reading and fables shape identities?

LP: I drew inspiration not from books, but from the children’s groups in the summer camps and in the tuberculosis sanatoriums, where there was one caregiver for every thirty children. And we were alone in the bedrooms. And all throughout the night, I was telling scary stories. I made them up. But the collective is stern and educates children what not to do, according religious traditions - thou shalt not brag, thou shalt not be proud, thou shalt not lie, nor steal, nor sin. Thou shalt not be smarter than others, nor more talented than others. And the punishments are severe. But I always performed in the children’s shows, sang in the concerts, drew in the studios -- that was my answer to the collective. I was beaten. I answered. Art is the only place for the outcasts, for the poor, for those who have it worst. The collective opinion cannot conquer them, they can only be ruined by their own inclinations and weaknesses. Alcohol, narcotics. How many of my colleagues, young writers, are dead. Even I, myself, smoked, and at gatherings of all kinds drank wine, and then, when I was pregnant at 37, I quit it all. I stopped eating meat too.

MB: Can you tell me what it was like when you first started writing and trying to get published Russia?

LP: I began writing at the age of 30, and my first story “Such a Girl, The Conscience of the World,” immediately went out to the public, and was mass copied, reprinted on typewriters. But everyone said that they would never publish it. It was published twenty years later. My first play, “Music Lessons” (written in 1973), was forbidden for more than ten years. And my second play, “Love” (1974), was permitted in 1980 and immediately was picked by the three biggest theaters in Moscow. And at 50 years of age, in 1988, came my first book of short stories with a circulation of 30,000 copies. That book, by the way, sold out in a few days. But even after I was widely known, my stories and plays were retyped by different people and were passed from hand to hand. Perhaps, back then I was even more well known than today. Actors put on my plays in apartments.

MB: Do you have any advice for young writers and artists?

LP: One word of advice: listen! Listen to those who tell the story of their lives. There are many of them. Remember, HOW these people talk, and remember each person speaks for themselves. All of a sudden, someone’s story will hook you and it will lead you to write.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in 1938 in Moscow, where she still lives. She is the author of more than fifteen collections of prose, including the New York Times bestseller There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales (2009), which won a World Fantasy Award and was one of New York magazine’s Ten Best Books of the Year and one of NPR’s Five Best Works of Foreign Fiction, and There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories (2013). A singular force in modern Russian fiction, she is also a playwright whose work has been staged by leading theater companies all over the world. In 2002 she received Russia’s most prestigious prize, the Triumph, for lifetime achievement.

Yasmin Zaher, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Mohsin Hamid about his book, Exit West (Riverhead), which is among the final five selections in the category of Fiction for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

In a way, Exit West is nothing like Mohsin Hamid's previous books. Yes, it follows the intimate relationship of two brown lovers, Said and Nadia. Yes, its setting is a failed state, and in a larger sense, a failed world. But Exit West tells a story of refugees with such compassion that I couldn’t help but wonder, ‘Where's Mohsin's grit, cynicism, moral complication?’ And then later, once my writer-of-color paranoia hit in, 'Who are these likable Muslim characters performing for? Where is the dirty laundry of the East?'

It is this paranoia that is at the heart of my questions for Mohsin Hamid, the little voices in our head that want to depict the good without being apologetic and the bad without feeding into stereotypes, but at the same time want to write freely and for oneself. Exist West found the answer to these questions, perhaps because of Hamid’s humanist politics or perhaps because of his belief in a kind of spiritual unity or a maturity of age, recognizing that the Western gaze is part of his singular voice that him and they are not separate and have never been.

Yasmin Zaher (YZ): I was surprised by the narrative voice of Exit West. It is straightforward, reliable. You said that it was inspired by the tone of children’s books, so I’m even tempted to say that it’s naive. Is that a reaction to the cynical political climate, or is it a personal trajectory of yours?

Mohsin Hamid (MH): I think both. My first novel, Moth Smoke, has cynical characters, an untrustworthy narrator, all sorts of corruption: personal, political, and emotional. It was a reaction to growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, a supposedly Islamized and pure place. I wanted to show it as the opposite. But I do think that in this moment, politically speaking, truth and honesty have become debased and denied. I wanted to write something that tries to be true, with characters that are trying to be decent.

But it might as well be personal. I’m 46 years old, I have two kids, I have been writing novels for 25 years and living with my family in Pakistan where I am the middle generation: my parents the older ones, my kids the younger ones. I think I have been looking personally, for myself and in my own life, at these sorts of issues. What sort of person should I be and how should life be lived? I think as a father and also as a son I’m trying to figure that out. In some senses I’m looking at older forms. Not just children’s books, but for example, I’m re-engaging with ideas in Sufi literature, or Zen thought. I’m trying to look at traditions of older wisdom and investigate if there is something useful there for me. Something that can be described as not specific to one religion but open to everybody.

YZ: You talk about writing decent characters, but decency is not a neutral term. What constitutes decency for you, and as a writer, how is the experience of constructing decent characters different than the morally questionable characters of your previous books?

MH: Well, I think that decency is not necessarily a state that a character inhabits, so much as an orientation that they value. Said and Nadia are not perfect human beings, they do things which they each individually regard as potentially wrong - for Said leaving his father in the novel is something that he doesn’t know if it’s the correct thing to do. So it’s not that people are fundamentally decent or indecent, but rather the impulse towards decency is an important impulse to take seriously. And many people do. This is why even in situations of enormous ethnic tension or political pressure we have people not behaving violently. The story of humanity is not the story of genocide and murder it’s the story of so many genocides and murders that do not happen, because decency holds. It doesn’t mean that their sense of decency is the correct one, but it’s something of meaning to them. This notion is almost old-fashioned. But it’s something I’m interested in because I think this old notion is actually true of many and for most people much of the time.

If we write only of characters who feel no strong compulsion towards decency, then we are only writing about one facet of humanity. I’ll give you an example of this. My daughter likes to write songs. She’s eight years old, she plays the guitar, and often she’ll be singing something like “From the center of my loneliness... I can see the darkness...” And I asked my daughter, she’s a very happy kid, “What is up with all these dark lyrics that you’re writing?” And she said, “Baba, happy stuff is really difficult to write, and also the dark stuff just sounds better.” When I was younger, the inclination to explore the darker side of oneself was very strong, and I’m not sure if it’s because I thought it was easier to write, or if I thought it sounded better. But at this point for me I am interested in the exploration of the other side. Unless we reckon with the potential for goodness, seriously, then we end up leaving on the table a big part of human capacity. And if literature doesn’t reckon with this then I think we’re failing culturally as a society.

YZ: I really admire your female characters, how independent and strong-willed they are, some would say “liberated.” What is your approach to writing female characters?

MH: The nicest thing I’ve heard about Exit West recently was a woman who said that she kept feeling as if it was written by a woman. And that was an interesting thing for me to hear, because what does it mean for something to be written by a woman or by a man? For her, the main character was Nadia and the sensibility of the book, the way it approached certain issues, was a way that she associated with woman-ness. I was really touched by this remark, in the same way that if you were writing about America, or California, or Albany, NY, and somebody would say “Wow I really felt that this was written by somebody from Albany,” then it is quite a generous comment. So when I write a female character, I imagine being a woman, and more than being just a woman, I imagine being that woman. For me writing characters is about imaging being specific people. What’s it like not just to be a woman, but a particular woman, a singular woman, an individual woman.

My approach to that comes from the fact that I have been surrounded by women my whole life. [I have a] very strong matriarchal family. But of course there is a political dimension to being a man writing a character who is a woman, and I’m aware of that. I tend to try to write characters who are both liberated and not at the same time, as we all are. Nadia in some sense is liberated in other ways she isn’t, to herself. Same is true for Mumtaz from Moth Smoke. I’m also interested in the ways in which men can be strong by having characteristics we are told are female, like gentleness, being nurturing. Said, for example, is a gentle man. But it takes incredible strength to be gentle in the way that he is in the circumstances that he finds himself in. It takes less strength to not be gentle. In this way these two characters are both strong but in different ways, and each are me imaging myself to be a different person.

YZ: The part of the book when Nadia and Said arrive in London is very interesting. First you envision the refugees occupying the wealthy neighborhoods of Kensington and Chelsea, and then later, the characters find themselves bonded in a labor camp. Are you saying something about border divisions being based not just on nationality, ethnicity and religion - but primarily on class?

MH: I think it is very much based on class. I think what we are seeing in the world today is that there is a cosmopolitan class. By virtue of education, wealth, social connections, cultural capital, whatever, it is able to move fairly effortlessly around the world and be exempt from the rules that apply to people who don’t have these benefits. Kensington and Chelsea in London are very largely owned by foreigners, but because they are wealthy, we don’t hear much in the way of protest about it. So I think there is a class component to all of this.

There is an alliance which we see in the center left, for example, between incredibly wealthy cosmopolitan people - many of whom who are quite opposed to regulations or government intervention that would improve conditions of those who are not wealthy - and other people who themselves are not wealthy but believe protection of the rights of immigrants and minorities, equality of gender and sexual orientation, etc. I believe that this an unsteady alliance because it’s difficult to ally with somebody who does not believe in equality to pursue equality. This kind of billionaire alliance with minorities, women, queers, etc. is an unstable alliance.

So the novel, yes, does explore this aspect of how it all does with class. I think the class connections in the current populist backlash shouldn’t be ignored. I think that for example, in American politics, there is a very strong racial undercurrent at play [and] a strong class element at play as well, to the extent that the Democrats have failed to help people of working and middle class backgrounds. Had more work been done to help people of working and middle class backgrounds by the Democrats then they might have been able to bridge, or lessen some of the racial elements that Trump has exploited.

YZ: How has your idea of readership changed over time and with your international success?

MH: I think living in Pakistan in particular, I no longer imagine that readers will approach novels in the same way that I imagined when I lived in New York or London. Myself and a lot of my friends who are writers went to similar universities, and had a particular interpretive apparatus that we brought to reading fiction. But I now believe that I need to write novels that contain within them the equipment needed to decode themselves. Too many readers don’t exist in a world of critics or reviews or literary culture. In fact, almost no readers exist in that world. So I’m trying to write novels that can be understood by people regardless of their background, it’s important to me. It doesn’t mean writing simple novels, or avoiding difficult issues, or writing simple sentences, or anything like that. I just have to put in the book what is required to make sense of it. You don’t have to read other books to read this book. I meet many readers in Pakistan who will say that one of my novels is the only novel that they’ve read.

The novel is a uniquely powerful form because it is a mode of communication between two individuals, one writer and one reader, each both composed and received in solitude. A reader while reading a novel contains the thoughts of two human beings inside of him, their own and the writer’s, and at that moment the reader is not just one person, they are a kind of hybrid being. I think this is a magical, incredible, fertile, beautiful, powerful relationship. I believe in the novel. That’s why I believe in opening it up to any reader. I don’t really have a reader in mind because all people are different from each other. I try to write books that I would like, and I try to write them in a way that they build a relationship with a human being in the course of the telling.

YZ: So when you know that someone like Barack Obama, who has concrete power over the fate of refugees, has read Exit West, it doesn’t change the way you write?

MH: I was very happy that [Barack Obama] liked my book. Happy is an understatement. I was quite thrilled, really. But as a reader he is no more or less important to me in thinking how to create a book than any other reader is. The novel impacts the policy reader not as a vehicle of policy, but by touching the human being. If the human being who is the policy maker has been touched, then the novel has done something. But not because I’ve advocated a policy, but because I’ve touched a person. Barack Obama is no different than any other reader. He’s just a human being to be touched.

YZ: Finally, I want to ask about drugs, they seems to be a recurring theme in your books.

MH: Let us just say that I have considered them significant, and that there is an ancient tradition of intoxication in literature, particularly in the literature of South Asia, in the Sufi form as well as others. Intoxication is a moment in which the self begins to change shape and become something else and it’s a very interesting and fertile domain to be explored in literature, and not unrelated to the experience of writing and reading itself. There is an intoxicating quality to reading and writing, and in it the self can shift.

Mohsin Hamid is the author of four novels, Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and Exit West, and a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations. His writing has been featured on bestseller lists, adapted for the cinema, twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and translated into over thirty-five languages. Born in Lahore, he has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California.

Yasmin Zaher was born in Jerusalem. She is a fiction writer, translator from Arabic and Hebrew, and co-producer of Palestinian Hip-Hop drama Junction '48. She lives in New York City and is doing her MFA in Creative Writing at The New School.

Brenda Ray, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Henry Marsh about his book Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon (St. Martins), which is among the final five selections in the category of Autobiography for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

Brenda Ray: After writing your New York Times best-selling memoir, Do No Harm, what inspired you to write, Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon? How much time did you take in between each book? When did you begin writing it?

Henry Marsh: The first book was a re-writing of parts of the diary I have kept since the age of 12. That took about 10 years. The second book took less than a year and I started it two years after publication of the first book—some new material and some old, which had not been in the final version of the first book.

BR: In your book you speak so easily about surgical procedures. You did a great job translating these complexities into layman’s terms. Did you find this difficult to do—writing a medical memoir to readers who aren’t necessarily doctors?

HM: I didn’t find it especially difficult. Good doctoring (and I can only hope I am one) involves spending a lot of time explaining things to patients in language they can understand.

BR: I love your sentimentality towards animals, a theme that recurs again and again. I think people often associate surgeons with a removed, sterile affect, so it was refreshing to see this side of you—a surgeon who pities the pig cadavers. I wonder if it’s difficult to maintain this sentimentality in your vocation. Do you find it hard to strike a balance between compassion and practicality?

HM: Yes, it’s very difficult and it’s the central problem at the heart of medicine. Where you are on the spectrum between compassion and scientific detachment depends on many factors: your age, your personality, your role models, the culture of the department and country in which you work, and your own personal experiences, or your family’s, of being a patient (which most young doctors and nurses don’t have).

BR: As a nonfiction writer, I sometimes recognize things about myself whileI’m writing. Did you come to discover some things about yourself that might have surprised you? You speak so much about your family, your first marriage, your son William, your parents. Did you learn anything about yourself while you were writing that perhaps you didn’t quite realize before?

HM: No, I don’t think so. I have had psychotherapy twice during my life; I would like to think I am reasonably good at looking at myself. My wife [second] and three children are fairly good at gently criticizing me, and that helps—although I don’t always take it with a good grace.

BR: I was interested in your juxtaposition of English healthcare and Nepalese healthcare. This is, of course, beyond my depth but I actually really like some of the Nepalese practices. In one chapter you describe, “hand-bagging” which is family members physically squeezing a respiratory bag of their brain-dead loved one, so that they can take the patient home and have a dignified death. I like the idea of a death occurring in the home, surrounded by loved ones and familiar walls. I think Americans are afraid of death. In your time overseas were there are any Nepalese practices that you found you preferred to English ones?

HM: Dying at home, yes. In the UK, more than 50% of people die in hospitals. American healthcare—both patients and doctors—are especially bad at not knowing when to stop and let Nature take its course.

BR: I’ve been exploring mortality a lot lately—in my own family and in my own writing. Did you ever come across a patient who accepted their mortality well? Can you recall anyone who responded in an either peaceful or interesting way?

HM: As a neurosurgeon, most of my patients are not compos mentis when near death. Most people put on a brave face when they meet doctors and we only have a brief glimpse of what they really feel. As a clinician, I am often still holding out hope to patients that treatment might help a little. I deliver death sentences more often to relatives than patients.

BR: I love when you described your childhood dog, the experience of power and cruelty and its effects on a living creature. You describe the regret you felt and how this lesson has possibly made you a kinder surgeon, such a beautiful insight. Did this memory of your dog occur as you were writing your book or has it sort of always stuck with you in your work as a surgeon?

HM: It’s always been there and a constant pain, but usually submerged.

BR: I was moved by your renovation of the lock-keeper’s cottage. In the language you can tell that the property is very dear to you. My favorite part is when you’re feeling low about the ongoing vandalism and a stranger stops by and says, “Hey I used to live here!” I love the idea of many bodies living in a place, of passing through it, giving their life and memories to it.

In my mind, I see the cottage as a reconciliation to mortality, a way of finding peace and passing it on to the lives ahead. I see this when the stranger says, “My parent’s ashes are scattered in the bushes.” It’s so beautiful. I want to know, how’s the cottage these days? Are you still working on it? Does its meaning remain steadfast and have the vandals finally left it alone?

HM: Yes, I am still working on it, but I am also employing builders to do some of the work, having admitted I cannot do it all. I remain very busy medically—working part-time in London for the NHS but also abroad in Pakistan, Nepal, Ukraine, etc. And you are quite right, the cottage is a symbol of mortality, and our vain but essential struggle against it. I am giving the cottage new life and one day somebody else will live in it.

BR: What’s next? Are you still writing? Are you going to renovate another home?

HM: No more renovation once the cottage is done but I am always making things and starting to work on a new book—but in the very early stages.

Henry Marsh is the author of the bestselling Do No Harm, an astonishingly candid insight into the life and work of a neurosurgeon. It has been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction and the Guardian First Book Award. He read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University before studying medicine at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1984 and was appointed Consultant Neurosurgeon at Atkinson Morley’s/St George’s Hospital in London in 1987, where he still works full time.

Brenda Ray, writer, singer, poet, and storyteller, is an internationally touring artist from Boise, Idaho and an MFA student at The New School in New York. Her memoir essay, "The Most Beautiful Thing" won Seattle's Arksey Essay Contest and her spoken word album, "The Blue Room" was awarded an invitation to England's Glastonbury Festival. Her work has appeared in Brooklyn Magazine, Yahoo Beauty, Acrobat, The Lingua Journal, and Four Chambers Press. Brenda's work has also been heard by Sofar Sounds New York, The National Endowment of the Arts' Poetry Out Loud, Boston's Cantab Lounge, The Seattle Grand Slam, The National Undergraduate Literature Conference, Chicago's Girl Radio, Radio Boise, and many many more places. Brenda has performed in hundreds of schools, community centers, prisons, homeless shelters, colleges, and universities across the country. She currently resides in New York, New York where she is a teaching fellow at Eugene Lang College.

Wynne Kontos, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Carmen Maria Machado about winning the 2018 NBCC John Leonard Prize for her debut novel, Her Body and Other Parties.

Carmen Maria Machado’s writing considers the individual. Within her words the reader finds new questions—what does our pain make of us? Can truth be found within? And answers are found sprinkled throughout the text, sometimes in the most unexpected places.

Recipient of the National Book Critic Circle Award’s John Leonard Prize for debut fiction, Her Body and Other Parties, is a story collection rich in femininity, identity, uncovering trauma and independence. Machado’s sentences are lyrical, often poetic but never indirect. Her imagery is surprising, but in the same moment, intensely recognizable.

From her home in Philadelphia, Machado spoke with The New School MFA student, Wynne Kontos about grieving turkeys, the female experience and staying strong as a new writer.

Wynne Kontos (WK):Thank you so much for speaking with me; this is such an honor. I so admire your collection. Do you remember some of the earliest stories you ever wrote?

Carmen Maria Machado (CMM): I wrote a lot of poems, very dramatic essays and short stories. Of course I use these terms very loosely. The one I remember most clearly is a book I wrote on my father’s stationery called, “The Biggest Turkey Can’t Find the Farm.” It’s about a turkey who’s lost and trying to get home. At the very end he gets to the farm, and the final page is a roast turkey on a plate that says, “I wish I did not come here.”
My parents were really disturbed, but I was very interested in this darkness. It’s weird when I look back at stories I wrote as a kid because I have the same interests, I’m just a better writer now. It’s all about death and illness and sadness—all the same things.

WK: That was my next question, how has your writing grown and changed leading up to your debut collection?

CMM: Yeah, it hasn’t changed at all. I just write better sentences.

WK:The stories in this collection have recognizable bits of our world, but often include a twist. What was it like workshopping pieces like this? Have you ever received pushback from peers or editors to more clearly define the ethereal aspects of your writing?

CMM: Mostly, no. The only time someone responded super negatively was when I workshopped “Especially Heinous.” One classmate loathed it and wrote me a very mean and angry letter. That happened once. But the rest of the workshop was really encouraging and everyone was really nice. Generally speaking, my workshop experience was really positive and I felt really supported with my projects.

WK:What about in the publishing process?

CMM: I struggled to publish certain stories. For instance “Especially Heinous” took me a long time to sell. The biggest sort of obstacle I faced was that they were short stories, it wasn’t even about world building, or experimentation, it was short story collections are hard sells.

I’m really lucky I’ve been able to find a publisher, an agent and people who took a risk with my work, even though it was this completely unmarketable thing (laughs).

WK: What is some writing advice that you applied to this collection?

CMM: My beloved teacher Michelle Huneven, who was one of my teachers at Iowa, gave me a really hard time about my sentences. She was like, “You’re sentences are almost good, but you’re getting lazy about them. You really need to sit on them—work on your sentences.” That became something I really kept in mind, and was on my mind as I was writing and editing.

WK: How do you “sit on your sentences?” How did you work your way around that bit of advice she gave you?

CMM: I had to spend more time with them and not forget them. There were things I was sort of doing, that now I do all the time, like read my sentences out loud for example. Really thinking about each sentence and what it’s doing and not thinking of them as secondary. They become a really important way to get into a piece of writing.

WK: So much of the female experience is rooted in mental or physical pain, and your writing captures that in such detail. In “Bad At Parties” a woman lives with the aftermath of physical trauma, in “The Husband Stitch” you write about childbirth and the sexualization of an episiotomy procedure. But then we have “Inventory” or “Eight Bites,” which begin with the lead character’s discomfort. While physical pain is often part of the female condition, there’s also the reality of just—discomfort, and your characters experience this too. From these types of pain or discomfort your characters often find strength rooted in their experiences. Can you talk more about that? Why you’re compelled to explore these concepts in your work?

CMM: That’s a really good question. I just wrote an essay for Roxane Gay and I wrote about my body and the ways in which my body fails me, of which there are many, and thinking about the ways in which you are constantly trying to work around your own limitations whatever those might be. I feel like pain and suffering whether it’s physical or not physical is sort of a thing you have to work around—like you don't have to, but you do have to or you’ll die. You won’t be able to get where you need to go. That place is very interesting for me as a writer, and that comes from my own life and feelings about being a woman in the world.

WK: The novella in this collection, “Especially Heinous,” is 272 imagined synopsis of Law and Order: SVU episodes. There were several moments of humor, but this piece also reminded me how discomfiting it is to admit I’m a long time viewer of this program. It’s a show that tries to draw attention to issues around sexual assault and abuse, but it’s still using those traumas to entertain us. Is this novella a commentary of any kind?

CMM: I think it’s a combination of a love letter to a show I watch and have a lot of feelings about, and a critique. It’s a lens because the show itself is an interesting way to examine narratives about sexual assault and how they play out and how we consume them. It’s relevant to me that the only currently running Law and Order franchise is the rape one. But it has this real staying power that has outlived every other version.

It’s funny, I was recently re-watching some old episodes of Law and Order: SVU, and it’s so much better than the new stuff. The early SVU is actually pretty solid in a lot of ways, and I was kind of admiring how decent it was in an aesthetic sense. But [the novella is] a critique and a perfect lens to discuss this issue, it’s sort of weird how perfect it is. I felt like it gave me the space to talk about the things I feel strongly about which is the narrative of sexual violence and also what it feels like to binge something on Netflix.

WK:A favorite part of this collection for me is the conversations with other women that it inspired. There’s something extraordinary about reading powerful work about women, but also something overwhelming about identifying these common experiences we share. Why do you think that is?

CMM: Everybody sort of knows that feeling of someone saying a thing and you think, I thought only I felt that thing. It’s this shock of being recognized and the intensity of realizing the shared experience is a highlight of the trauma. [It can] feel like it’s a lot of pieces have fallen into place and can be a very uncomfortable experience.

I think that’s the reason the story “Cat Person” went viral because it’s a sudden moment of common recognition of a very specific, very relatable scenario that felt very familiar to a lot of women—this very varied sort of trauma that’s hard to talk about it, which in that case is technical consent, when you just feel like you can’t be bothered, or you can’t say no because it’s too much of a hassle.

WK: What does your ideal writing day look like?

CMM: I’m not at home, I’m somewhere in the wilderness, away from my whole life. I don’t write very well at home, I kind of need to be elsewhere. I write in my apartment or little coffee shops, but I prefer residencies. When I’m at home, there’s always something to clean, always something to do. I want to wake up really early and have coffee, have a little bit of breakfast and just write and write until noon and then read or hike for the rest of the day and then go to bed super early. That’s my ideal writing day.

WK: What can you tell us about your upcoming memoir, House in Indiana?

CMM: I can’t talk about it too much, because it is still very much a thing in flux, but what I can say is it’s an experimentally structured memoir about physical abuse in same-sex relationships, trauma and narratives of trauma and probably other stuff too. That’s what I can say about it, everything else is just sort of, who knows?

WK: What are some things you wished you’d known while you were in your MFA program? What would you tell your MFA self?

CMM: I would’ve said, “Calm down it’s going to be okay.” I was figuring out who I was as an artist and was very anxious about performing in a certain way. The agents who visited Iowa would tell me, “It’s very hard to sell short stories! Call me when you have a novel!” I’d feel very dejected and despondent. [Other writers] were getting picked up left and right and I was sort of like sad George Michael from “Arrested Development” thinking, I’m never going to get picked up, no one’s going to want me!

Every teacher I had, even Lan Samantha Chang said, just make good art, take the time, don’t get to overly worked up about the professional stuff, it’ll all work out. Just try to work on your work. I always felt like, easy for you to say, famous writer! But it’s true. In retrospect they’re one hundred percent right, that other stuff will fall into place, I just wasn’t there yet. I would try to get myself to be a little less anxious about the professional stuff, honestly. It’s fine and it all works out.

WK: That’s lovely to hear. All writers can do it; we’re going to survive!

CMM: Yes! Just make good art, everything else will fall into place. But you’ve got to make good art.

WK: Is there anything else you want to share about your work or your process, anything you feel would be good for emerging writers to know?

CMM: You don’t have to live in New York to be a writer; I say that as a rule of thumb. People always say that and I don’t think it’s true. You have to keep reading, because when you read a really good book, story or essay it’ll remind you why you want to be writing. People will always have more than you have, especially in a professional sense. That’s a given, and it’s normal to feel that way, but you just have to make good art.

Carmen Maria Machado’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, NPR, Guernica, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and Best Women’s Erotica. She has received the Bard Fiction Prize, and been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and Nebula Award. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, the University of Iowa, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the artist in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

Wynne Kontos is a Licensed Masters social worker currently receiving her MFA in Fiction at The New School. Her writing is featured in Love Sick: Growing Up with a Parent Who Has Cancer, Moonlit Wing and The Inquisitive Eater with interviews in Teachers and Writers Magazine, Critical Mass, The New School Blog and the One Story blog. She has performed her work with the writing collective, Lost Lit, and at the 25 East Gallery in Manhattan. She lives and works in New York City.

Jeffrey Preis, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed John McPhee about winning the 2018 NBCC Ivan Sandrof Award.

John McPhee has lived in Princeton, New Jersey for most of his life. He grew up around the campus as a young boy — his father was the athletic department’s physician — and he spent his undergraduate career there. He currently teaches a class on creative nonfiction — a genre some say he helped pave, and has taught it since 1974. McPhee has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than 50 years and his book, Annals of the Former World, won a Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction in 1999.

His last book , Draft No. 4,, was published in late 2017 and it’s dedicated to the writing process. The book touches on the emotions, hardships and frustrations that all young writers face at one point — I can confirm this to be true. He’s covered a range of subjects from an entire book on oranges to a geological history of North America and an essay on The Army Corps of Engineers attempt to control the Mississippi River. His tenured career has been rooted in his quest for knowledge and he is more than deserving of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

Jeffrey Preis (JP): What differences do you notice now versus when you started teaching?

John McPhee (JM): Well, of course, when I started teaching long ago, nobody was using computers then. There was no internet. I got into writing on a computer in 1984 which is fairly early and of course, that’s what we all do now. As far as the quality in their writing, there hasn’t been a trend up or down. They’re a selected group from an applicant pool of 50 or 60 or 70, and they’re good at what they do.

JP:In writing creative nonfiction, the writer’s skill in conveying a sense of place and local color can be key to his success. Do you use a formula or is it work specific?

JM: Work specific. I don’t use anything that could be called a formula. I have, however, certain methods that repeat themselves. In certain basic things, for example, all research is done before the writing begins, in distinct phases. Of course, you could violate these principles. The lead is written before the actual structuring is done and then you figure out what the structure is and where you’re going to go and then you go back and write the rest of it. As far as atmosphere and local color, that’s a matter of soaking up everything you can, perhaps in what you have spent scribbling down [what] you think might be useful later on about the world you’re in out there.

JP:While we're on structure, I read your book, Draft No. Four and you have a section on writer's block that appears towards the end of the book. In the Essay version in The New Yorker, you open up with that section on writer's block.

JM: The first word is “block.”

JP:Exactly. My question is how do you make the transition from essay to book; how much do you have to alter the structure of it?

JM: The pattern is, and has been true for all of my books from the beginning — I’m a New Yorker writer and everything has begun as something for The New Yorker. So, the books come along about a year, at least, after something’s been in TheNew Yorker. And if it’s a collection of New Yorker pieces, like Draft No. 4, I did that over a period of a number of years. One of [the essays] was in a previous book, but when I put all [the essays] together as a book, I don’t necessarily have to follow the publication dates in TheNew Yorker. I’d have to look at the book to see what order, but I thought the essay on “Omission” just made a good place to end this book, so that’s why it’s [the last in] this book.

JP: You don't necessarily paint the prettiest picture in terms of the writer's life, you refer to it as the “masochistic, self-inflicted paralysis of a writer’s normal routine.” After so many years, what have you learned most from this lifestyle?

JM: The negative side of it is important, I think. First of all, there’s a bit of hyperbole in that. And I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else but this. But every single day when you face the writing, it’s daunting and, basically what I’m talking about is the part that takes the longest, which is the first draft. After the second draft and the third draft, things are accomplished in a much shorter period of time, and you’ve got some confidence, you’ve got the thing there on paper and you’re working to improve it. So, we’re really talking about first drafts when you don’t really know where you’re going and hope that you can get to wherever it is. And as I said in the book, I think it is rational not to have confidence. Whatever you’ve written before isn’t going to write this one for you.

JP:What autobiographical influences do you nice in your writing? For example, did your love of kayaking and fishing lead you to the Atchafalaya River?

JM: No, what led me to the Atchafalaya was that a daughter of mine took a course with Robert Coles at Harvard. Robert Coles was teaching Walker Percy and Sarah got totally zonked with Walker Percy and she wanted to see Walker Percy country and [asked me if I’d] take her there on her spring vacation. I thought, ‘fine, we’ll go to New Orleans…but, what’s in it for Dad?’ [I got a hold of someone who] told me about Charlie Fryling at LSU…and the upside of that was that I got in Charlie Fryling’s canoe, Sarah too, and we [went] into the Atchafalaya. The story about [the Atchafalaya], I didn’t know about it at all…and [my friend] set me up with Charlie because she thought it was interesting. After hearing about it all day long, I thought so too. Of course, paddling around in the swamp was my cup of tea.

JP:Writing teachers often tell their students, especially when analyzing books that nothing is there accidentally, meaning, the author does not purposely include this or that detail, but upon completion, the writer has a sense of holistic completion that everything seems to go together. Do you notice this in your writing, especially given that a lot of your writing is heavily vetted by multiple departments at The New Yorker?

JM: I don’t know, listening to that quote and everything, it certainly sounds familiar. Of course, that’s what one does when one starts a project and collects the raw materials for the piece. And in the end, you want it to fit that description. I wouldn’t turn in a piece that I didn’t think did. [As far as] examples, well, really, just anything. That’s your goal. My goal is to do the best I can do, not the best that ever was done because I can’t do that. But I can do the best I can do and when I get there, I call it a day.

JP:What about those kismet or déjà vu moments when writing — do you ever experience that and, if so, how does it influence what you’re working on?

JM: That happens all the time and it doesn’t exclusively or even a majority of the time occur when you’re writing. It occurs for me when I’m out interviewing. Things occur that you just know are going to be significant in the book. At the end of my time in the Swiss Army, I was attached to some unit, and these guys [were] doing a war exercise where it was all concocted. Word comes in on the walkie-talkie that a petite atomic bomb had exploded. Well, I heard that, and I scribbled down exactly what the message was and I also thought, ‘right there, there’s my ending.’ Whatever my piece of writing is going to be, that’s how it’s going to end. This kind of thing happens, from time to time, when you’re interviewing when you hear something you just know just belongs in the subject you’re addressing.

JP:Any regrets in terms of your writing?

JM: No, I think I’ve been lucky. I got into a form of writing after trying different things. This whole business is about real people and real places and that somehow fit my psychological nature better than poetry or novel-writing and you find that out by experimentation. I feel lucky that I got into that good and early and tried other things and that I felt comfortable in this niche. William Shawn (editor of The New Yorker from 1952-1987) talked about this all the time — young writers take more time, he said, to figure out what kind of writers they are. I started doing this when I was pretty young and I’m very glad I got into this niche because I feel very comfortable there and I feel like that’s where I belong. I was also very lucky to get connected to TheNew Yorker where Shawn seemed to be particularly interested in long-fact writing. That’s what I do, so that was pretty lucky.

JP:What advice would you give to your 30-year-old self?

JM: Well, number one, I say stop worrying! I’m very concerned about writers in their twenties and into their early thirties because I spent most of my time fretting and fussing over the fact that I didn’t have confidence. I don’t like to see other people go through that. There’s nothing less promising than an over confident, inexperienced writer. That makes no sense at all. You’ve got to have a certain doubt in order to do a good piece of writing. I’d do anything I could to keep the thirty-year-old from biting his nails. When I turned 30, I was working at Time Magazine and I thought that that was terminal, that I was never going to get along with anything else, that as a writer, [I wondered] what kind of future did I have? I remember going into some restaurant on my 30th birthday in the Upper East Side and feeling particularly gloomy because I turned 30. When I tell these stories to young writers, about the fact that I started sending things to TheNew Yorker when I was 18-years-old and [didn’t sell] my first little thing to them until I was 31, and it was a little thing indeed. When I turned 33, I sold them something that changed my life and I’ve been there ever since. I don’t tell that story to depress anyone, I tell that story because this is how it worked for me. Writers grow slowly. And that’s why those years are taking the time.

John McPhee began contributing to The New Yorker in 1963. He has written more than a hundred pieces for the magazine, among them a Profile of Senator Bill Bradley during his days as a Princeton basketball star, an examination of modern-day cattle rustling, and several multipart series on a wide range of subjects, including Alaska; a voyage on a merchant ship down the west coast of South America as a Person in Addition to Crew; a stint with the Swiss Army; and the writing process. Between 1955 and 1956, he wrote for television, before joining Time, where he contributed pieces about show business until 1964. He has taught writing at Princeton University since 1975, and in 1982 was awarded Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Award for service to the nation. He is the author of twenty-eight books, all of them based on his New Yorker writings. Among them are “Coming Into the Country,” which was nominated for a National Book Award; “Encounters with the Archdruid”; “The Control of Nature”; “Looking for a Ship”; “The Ransom of Russian Art”; and “Annals of the Former World,” which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. His most recent books are “Uncommon Carriers,” and “Silk Parachute,” a collection of pieces ranging from North American lacrosse to the Cretaceous chalk of Europe.

Jeffrey Preis was born and raised in New Orleans, and moved to New York City in the Fall of 2016 to begin a Master’s in The New School’s Creative Writing program. He currently interns for The Points Guy and is working on his thesis on the Mississippi River and Louisiana.

Chelsie Hinds, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Xiaolu Guo about her book, Nine Continents (Grove), which is among the final five selections in the category of Autobiography for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

As a Chinese writer based in London, Xiaolu Guo is particularly concerned with the topic of transnational identity. In what is both memoir and Bildungsroman, Nine Continents takes us back to the start of Xiaolu’s peripatetic upbringing. She narrates her journey from the small fishing town, Shitang, to the communist center, Wenling, from the creative hub that is Beijing and to London where her career took flight, and does so with the panache and severity imbued in her earlier works. Years after leaving China, the birth of her daughter urges her back to her homeland and to the life she left behind.

I spoke with Xiaolu recently about the steps she took to confront her youth in 1980s-1990s China and about the way the past has shaped her present.

Chelsie Hinds (CH): Would you say that your formative years of illiteracy influenced or spurned your desire to write at all?

Xiaolu Guo (XG): I don’t think I can isolate one event from another in my early years in terms of the making of a future writer. It is all connected. For me it has to do with lack of imagination: if someone has that in her earlier years and wants to have an expanded life through imagination, she will probably begin to write. Also, it was the 1970s and 80s; we had so little other means to pass time. I treated diary writing as my entertainment in my teens.

CH: Each part of the book is broken up into essays. When you started to write, did you plan to format it that way? Or did it take that form as you recalled different aspects of your childhood? By dividing the narrative into specific subjects, was it easier to walk yourself through your own story?

XG: I somehow never believe the “perfect narrative." I trust more fragmented structure, especially because I was working with memories and reflections. Also, I felt like I was writing a diary again. I wrote some small essays on my childhood before the book was formed. It felt more natural this way.

CH: What methods or rituals did you use to tap into your childhood and access those memories? Did you find it more painful or therapeutic?

XG: Before I wrote this book, I wrote a few novels based on my past experiences as a struggling young woman in a mad world. So, there is this basic distance between a (not-so-young) narrator and his/her own past. After all, a writer cannot only use his body to write; his head has some distance with his hands and heart. And this distance is the method. It was painful from time to time, but I am not a first time writer, so I have gone through the digestion process of certain events in my life.

CH: You’ve written fiction and nonfiction books as well as quite a few articles. How would you say your writing process differs for a memoir?

XG: It is similar. Even with articles, I don’t write in a journalistic way.

CH: When reading the scene about leaving your grandparents, specifically your grandmother, I could feel the pain and confusion seven-year-old Xiaolu felt. There are other moments in the book that are equally as visceral and I imagine it must have been hard to put yourself back in those places. Were there memories included in the book you were especially reluctant to engage with or delve into? And how did you overcome that reluctance and reticence?

XG: Thanks. I actually always tried to delve into those moments. I tried to relive the past to feel that moment as if it was the first time I was experiencing it… I have never tried to avoid it. Isn’t that what writing is about?

CH: You’ve heard the quote, “What’s past is prologue?” I wonder how you feel about that idea after navigating through your own past. Do you view it as something that’s simply set the stage for the rest of your life? Or something that is constantly informing your decisions now?

XG: The past is prologue but also a constant-flowing present. It is inside a person’s psyche. As a person, I try to live in a creative or new way at each major stage of my life, but as a writer, I really rely on my past. It’s my major resource, and of course, I have gathered some intellectual resources, too.

CH: There’s a moment towards the end of the book when you’re visiting Shitang where you wonder if Moon looks at the ocean and sees it as “another part of her mother’s being.” Is that how you view the ocean? As part of your past? As part of your being? Would you say they’re one and the same?

XG: Thanks for such a lovely comment, and thanks for noticing that part of the book. I think you have answered the question with all of these possibilities.

CH: I read your article in The Guardian where you critique the English language because the lexical structure isn’t actually related to the meaning of a word. Whereas, in Chinese, characters and words relate to pictures and images. Would you say you were trying to do a similar thing here using the story of Monkey? As in, connecting your words and your written story with a familiar image?

XG: I think so. When I was structuring this book I tried to find a metaphorical layer to represent my journey—something from an ancient past, something to do with my cultural identity. Because I didn’t want the whole narrative to be a stab of concrete realness. It should have some layers. The monkey is me, and I was experiencing the creature’s journey in a very particular way in this book.

Xiaolu Guo is the author of Village of Stone, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, and I Am China. She has been named one of Granta‘s Best of Young British Novelists. Guo has also directed several award-winning films including She, A Chinese and a documentary about London, Late at Night. She lives in London and Berlin.

Chelsie Hinds is a Caribbean-American writer living in Harlem and an MFA candidate in fiction at The New School.

Melanie Odelle, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Layli Long Soldier about her book Whereas (Graywolf), which is among the final five selections in the category of Autobiography for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

Layli Long Soldier’s debut collection of poetry, Whereas (Graywolf) was written in part as a reaction to the 2010 Congressional Apology to Native Peoples of the United States, which is a resolution located deep within a document called the Defense Appropriations Act. President Barrack Obama signed the apology without announcing its existence to Native people or inviting Native American leaders to witness the signing. Long Soldier’s debut collection unravels the language of treaty, apology, and everyday conversation into poetry. She is Oglala Lakota, and stresses that her work does not speak for the entirety of Native American people. She is herself, an electric current of “I,” a laughing beam of the first-person, currently living in New Mexico, and poet-ing in the glow of her PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, her Whiting win, and her recent NBCC poetry award nomination.

Melanie Odelle: What is your favorite punctuation mark, and why?

Layli Long Soldier: My favorite punctuation mark? That’s hilarious. I like the period. I often prefer using a period instead of a question mark. I don’t like what the question mark does to the voice. I don’t think a question has to change the body, the inflection, and the voice. I much prefer to use the period over the question mark. It’s so final. I just think it’s cool.

MO: I believe Layli Long Soldier has thought a lot about punctuation.

LLS: Punctuation is really, ultimately, to score your work, almost like musical notation. It indicates breath. It indicates rest, pause, and so forth.

MO: I know! Well, Whereas lets me think about the page and the markings upon it. One of my favorite lines in your writing is from the first Whereasstatement:

Pages are cavernous places, white at entrance, black in absorption.

Echo.

The page is a place where thoughts can have physical consequences. For example, the treaty. The treaty is the ultimate representation of words having physical effects. The “penning” of a treaty becomes the literal “penning” of, quote the congressional apology, “Indian tribes within their boundaries.”

LLS: Well absolutely! It is language. Language that has had a true physical binding upon Native people’s lives—a physical effect on how we live and where we live. I used to teach at Diné College, which is the tribal college on the Navajo Nation. One of the classes I taught was a fundamental reading class. It was a class to bring new students up to college level reading. Some of the students had not read much before starting college. But the very first thing I had them read in this class, even though we were supposed to start at a very simple level, was their treaty.

That’s very difficult language to unravel. We took it slowly. We worked in groups with each article of the treaty. That was the one thing I wanted to impress upon them, that this is what directly affects your people, your families, your community. We’ve got to become comfortable with reading this language. As young people, you are not in the same position as your leaders [who signed the treaties with X’s instead of their names]. You have the opportunity and the chance to unravel this language and understand it.

Language is a very physical thing. It affects you. We don’t always remember that.

MO: Maybe a poem is a moment of contact between the outer and the inner. I’m reminded of the incredible way you bring us to the image of Andrew Myrick’s mouth stuffed with grass at the end of your poem, 38. It’s then that the poem becomes so physical, both for the reader, and within the imagery. You write:

I’m inclined to call this act by the Dakota warriors a poem.

There’s irony in their poem

There was no text.

“Real” poems do not “really” require words.

But at the same time, we need the words of Andrew Myrick to the starving Dakota: “If they are hungry, let them eat grass,” to inform us why the action of the Dakota people is a poem. Do you remember where you were when you first got the image of the grasses, the image that runs throughout Whereas?

LLO: I remember. I had already sent a first draft of Whereas to Graywolf. They had written back to say they were interested in my work, but the manuscript needed more time. I remember [being] really disheartened.

Ultimately, it did need some more work. It took me about a year to send in a second draft. During that year, I worked on the ordering and orchestration of the manuscript a bit more. I felt like I needed a kind of through line. Around that time I would go up to visit my family in South Dakota. One of the things that would make me feel at home was seeing and smelling the grasses. That smell and the sight of these long stretches of grass—man, I just can’t explain it. It’s a sense of belonging.

I would go to visit and then drive back down to the South West. Where we live, there really is not much grass.

MO: When I heard you lived in New Mexico, I thought, but wait, there’s no grass there!

LLO: I know! I remember writing this piece, “Irony.” It’s a real skinny poem. It was a piece I made when I was living in Tsaile, Arizona. I was thinking about the fact that there was no grass there. I began to realize that I had this kind of longing. I looked through my pieces and I noticed there were a few other places I had written about the grasses. I started to recognize a pattern in the work and my emotional leaning. Then I became intentional with it, and drafted a few more pieces for the purpose of bringing the book together through grass.

MO: When did you hear the story of the Dakota 38? Was that before or after you decided on the through line?

LLO: I heard the story many years ago, when I was much younger. It’s one of those stories I heard as a young person. That moment had always stuck with me, for years. It was something I knew through word of mouth. Because it was such a vivid image, the moment of finding Andrew Myrick’s body. I wanted to write something about it. I began researching. That story is actually a documented story. There are different tellings of it, but they are all almost the same.

MO: You’re unraveling the bureaucratic language of treaties, of narrative language, or of the superimposed language of English on Native America. You show us the fallacy and the successes of language as it relates to apology. How would you define what a meaningful apology is?

LLO: In a way, I did define it poetically, in the 5thWhereas piece. I wrote about an apology I got from my father. This was many years ago, when I was much younger. It was probably the most effective apology I’ve had in my life. Really, it was so effective, so magical, that I was able to put away a whole lifetime of grievances, of hurt, and of pain. I was able to put all of that away within minutes, just sitting with my dad and listening to him, and seeing a kind of sincerity. Seeing it, and feeling it physically. Physically, you can feel it.

That was testament to the power of a real and sincere apology. I still cannot really define it in a formulaic way, but that was the closest I could come to defining meaningful apology – in a poem.

MO: What made you choose to use the singular “I” in your work?

LLO: A lot of the pieces in here do address aspects of Native history, or language, or identity in some way. Granted, not all of my work has to do with Native issues. Some of it is about writing or being an artist. Some of my work is about Motherhood. The “I” is important.

I’m very conscious about using the pronoun “we,” and not speaking for others, or representing others. I try to only speak for myself. If the work does resonate with others, and others connect to it, that’s a blessing. I have a very conscious relationship to the pronouns I chose.

MO: I think that’s very important—because people are looking to a queer poet, or a black poet, or a native poet, and thinking, this person speaks for an entire group. All we can ever do is speak for ourselves and our personal histories.

LLO: Absolutely. I can’t even speak for my own family. Within my own family, there are many diverse views and experiences.

It’s funny. I’m actually working on my next book, and it’s tentatively titled WE. The reason the working title is WE, is because it’s a book of collaboration. I’m working on pieces that involve others in some way.

MO: Who are you collaborating with?

LLO: They’re not straightforward collaborations. For example, I have a very, very, very long poem that comes from an exhibit I had in Canada. I had people submit little pieces of paper into these boxes that I made, on the subject of grief. I had certain instructions. They inserted names of people, or questions they had, or ways of dealing with grief. The gallery just sent all those little pieces of paper back to me. I have them spread out on a table in my house. I have a whole chorus of voices on the subject of grief. I’m working right now with those submissions. I’m meditating with them and orchestrating them on the page, and then writing my own responses.

MO: Can you speak to the role of motherhood in your poetry?

LLO: If I say anything, it’s probably going to sound pretty cliché. But my daughter is the center of my life. She’s the ultimate thing that gives me a sense of purpose and drive. She is the thing that makes me get up, keep going, and keep moving forward. Because I must.

Layli Long Soldier received a 2015 Lannan Fellowship for Poetry, a 2015 National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award.

Melanie Odelle is a musician and writer from a small island in the Pacific Northwest. She is an MFA candidate at The New School and currently lives in Queens, New York. Her website is www.melanie-odelle.com.

Sam Roos, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Kenneth Whyte about his book, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (Knopf), which is among the final five selections in the category of Biography for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

In Hoover, author Kenneth Whyte delivers as intimate a portrait of the 31st US President as exists in the genre. Whyte presents the full life of a man for whom the presidency was only one of many chapters, including his difficult childhood, his rough-neck years as a engineer and mining executive in Australia and China, and his titanic humanitarian efforts during and after the first world war. The result is a deeply sympathetic portrait of one of America’s most misunderstood presidents. I spoke with Whyte to discuss his process and his subject.

Sam Roos: This book is incredibly well sourced, including over sixty-five pages of citations. How long was your research period?

Kenneth Whyte: The research really didn’t end until I stopped writing, so, about seven or eight years. I did it all chronologically, because I didn’t want to get too far ahead of the story looking back at his career with the knowledge that he had: A. become president, and B. that his presidency had been difficult. I wanted to experience his life as he lived it, from the beginning through the end, without a lot of preconceived ideas. So, I would go back and forth, from Toronto to [The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in] West Branch, Iowa, every six months or a year, to sort of pick up the next segment of his life and start anew.

SR:So you were trying to let the storylines guide you, rather than the other way around. Did that lead to specific storylines emerging that maybe you wouldn’t have found with a different approach?

KW: Absolutely. Every piece of it was different because of that approach. I think there’s a tendency in presidential biography to be respectful and ‘presidential’ in the presentation of the subject. So for instance, in Hoover’s boyhood there were some very difficult periods. After he was orphaned he was a neglected boy living with an uncle in small-town Oregon and having a very difficult time of it. I think this has been systemically underplayed by all the other biographers that have approached Hoover, because it doesn’t really fit the picture of presidential character. His business career as well: Hoover was much more ruthless and dastardly in his business activity than I had been led to expect by other biographical material. When you’re closing negotiations with other parties by waving a gun around and making threats, it doesn’t really fit with preconceived notions of how a president behaves.

Some of those in the last year might have changed a bit, but generally speaking, that’s not how we see our presidents.

SR: Do you think that’s the main reason people have this mischaracterized impression of Hoover as a failure? As I was reading, it felt to me like the biggest reason was FDR’s characterization of Hoover in the 1932 election.

KW: It’s never one thing in particular. Certainly FDR colored Hoover a certain way and was very effective at it. Hoover in his own speeches tended to idealize his background and make himself look like an ‘all-American boy’. He thought that would sell better to the electorate. So he’s kind of the author of his own cover up, as well as his biographers. They put in tangents, but mostly to try and make him look good, or look presidential, and that tended to highlight the more salubrious aspects of his career, and his childhood, more than the troubling ones.

SR: Many of the details Hoover’s personal life came through secondhand recollections and letters from people around him. Is there a reason you favor these adjacent accounts over, say, the George Nash biography of Hoover?

KW: First of all, George Nash wrote three volumes on Hoover’s career up to the age of 40… I think he’s done a tremendous job of researching and understanding Hoover. I learned a lot from him. That said, George’s biographical work was part of an official biography commissioned by the Hoover library, very much interested in explaining and understanding Hoover, the president. I was more interested in Hoover, the man. So I felt a need, not to look so much at public records, but to get a sense of what his life was like as lived by those around him as he lived it. He wasn’t an introspective person, he had no diaries, he wasn’t a letter writer, and he wasn’t inclined to sort of pick his own Boswell to tell a story, he just wasn’t tuned that way. But from a very early age he was surrounded by people who were really interested in him as a personality, saw something unique and great about him, and a surprising number of them kept very close records in their own diaries, notes, letters, about his comings and goings, his thoughts and his decisions. They allowed me to get a lot closer to Hoover than frankly I expected I would at the outset.

SR: We know from your last project, “The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst” that you’re interested in early 20th century America. Was there something specific that drew you to Hoover besides your interest in the era?

KW: Well, I don’t see much use in writing a book, and going to all that trouble, unless you’ve got something new to say, or you’re bringing someone to life that isn’t known. I was looking in the first half of the 20th century. I just wanted to move up a generation or two (from Hearst). So I was looking for a subject and reading a lot about the first world war, and Hoover kept popping up as this incredibly effective competent character— “a man of great capacities”— who was getting things done when no one else could get anything done, during the war and in the immediate aftermath. And the picture of him was so at odds with anything I’d read about Hoover that I got curious. You know, which was the real Hoover? How do you square the Hoover of the Great War with the guy who was a failed president? When I looked to see what was on the record biographically, I was surprised at how slight it was, and I started to think that he might be the subject. The fact that he has so little written about him, yet had such a critical role in American history, it was like this big gaping hole in the middle of America’s story. For me, that’s like the best thing you can find as a writer: some interesting, complicated subject, that nobody else has treated, that occurs at a very pivotal moment of history. So I felt like stumbled on a great opportunity.

SR: It feels to me like this book is meant to be redemptive for Hoover, or a least a correction of the record. How conscious of you were creating that narrative. Was it something you consciously did in your writing, or did you try and let his record, presented here in full, speak for itself?

KW: I felt that, in my Hearst book, I spent too much time arguing with other people’s estimations of [Hearst]. If I had to go back and do it again, I would just tell the story and let it speak for itself, rather than arguing with other writers and historians. So I went deliberately into Hoover determined not to think about ‘rankings’, what Arthur Schlesinger jr. had said about him, and just accept, good or bad, what I found. For instance, I came across, inevitably, the bonus army episode in 1932, which is one of the critical points in his career and in Roosevelt’s career. In the standard telling of the history of the period, Hoover screwed it up and Roosevelt, being more politically savvy, saw that immediately and capitalized on it and won the election of ’32 partially in consequence. What I found on the record was so completely at odds with that telling, I did feel I had to go out of my way at that point and note that there was this other telling of history in this period and this is what it was and this is why it was wrong. But, on the whole, I just let Hoover and his activities speak for themselves.

SR: Hoover’s legacy is inexorably tied to the question of who’s to blame for the Great Depression. You don’t shy away from the details when this subject comes up. There are times where you get very specific with statistics about economic policies and performance. How conscious were you of balancing that level of detail and keeping the book from delving into policy wonkiness?

KW: Yeah, that was a problem not only in the Presidency, but in the 8 years before that when he was commerce secretary, and I was very concerned about that, because it’s not a book about political science, it’s a biography. At the same time, he was a politician, so that was his business of the day so you have to sort of understand what he was doing and why he was doing it in order to understand the man. I tried to collect what, to my mind, were the most essential and illustrative examples of Hoover’s performance. I spend quite a bit of time on his efforts to fight the depression because I think that’s where he did a lot of his best work, in crisis-to-crisis management of the issues, coming up with novel, imaginative, creative solutions, sometimes very brave solutions, to the problems that faced the nation at that time. Not all of them were successful, you could argue that none of them were successful in that the economy never bounced back, but he went farther than any president had gone before him. When you admit how far Hoover went during his term, a lot of what Roosevelt does as his successor seems less novel, and the break between the republican era of the 20s and the new deal era of Roosevelt is then not anywhere near as sharp as it’s often portrayed.

SR: Were there parts of Hoover’s life that you researched and then ultimately left on the cutting room floor?

KW: I left books on the floor. One of the reasons that I think that Hoover was sitting there and really hadn’t been thoroughly done as a biography is there’s just too much! I think I spent one half sentence on Hoover in Poland and you could easily write a whole book on that. Or on Hoover in child welfare. The social science research that he commissioned as president was voluminous and informed 40 years of social policy. His work with Eisenhower and Truman on essentially reconstructing the administrative branch of government, I mean I gave it a few pages, but that was one of the most important episodes in the history of the presidency.

SR: You do that a few times, paying a paragraph or even a sentence’s worth of attention— oh by the way, he founded the FCC and the FDA—to these massive accomplishments.

KW: There’s just so much that he was involved in… the founding of the commercial aviation industry, the founding of the commercial broadcast industry, I said very little about the Hoover dam… But I wanted to get things in one volume, so you could get a good, close, honest rendering of his life, and that meant not going down all of the byways that were open to me.

SR: First Hearst, then Hoover… can we assume Hughes is next?

KW: Someone asked me if it was Hitler, another two syllable name starting with H. No, in fact, I’m not doing a biographical. And I’ve moved up a half a century, so I’m in the 60’s and the 70’s in this one, writing about what happened to American business in that time. There was a big shift with America ceasing to be a country in that Calvin Coolidge mode, “the business of America is business”, and becoming much more concerned about the consequences of economic growth and business activities. So I’m writing about that using the history of General Motors as my way into it.

Kenneth Whyte is the author of The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst, a Washington Post and Toronto Globe and Mail Book of the Year, and a nominee for four major Canadian book awards. He is a publishing and telecommunications executive and chairman of the Donner Canada Foundation. He was formerly editor in chief of Maclean’s magazine, editor of the monthly Saturday Night magazine, and founding editor of the National Post. He lives in Toronto.

Sam Roos is a first-year MFA fiction candidate at The New School. His work has appeared in The New School’s own The Inquisitive Eater, as well as NBCSports.com, The Second City Network, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He’s originally from Portland, Maine, currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, and is the biggest Red Sox fan you’ve ever met. You can find him on twitter, @Roostafarian.

Kaitlin McManus, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Caroline Fraser about her book Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Metropolitan Books), which is among the final five selections in the category of Biography for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

Kaitlin McManus: Laura Ingalls Wilder is a figure who, for the many of us who read the Little House books, we feel that we know fairly well. What prompted you to write a more telling biography of the real-life woman and her family?

Caroline Fraser: The “Laura” that most of us know from the books and the television show is, of course, a fictional character. Readers (especially younger readers) often believe that the books are memoirs describing the childhood of “Laura Ingalls.” But in fact they’re novels, so it’s a similar situation to movies that are “based on a true story.” That can mean anything, and indeed, the view of Wilder’s life presented by the books is fictionalized: There are invented scenes, characters, and dialogue, and the chronology of Wilder’s life was altered. The TV show, of course, is virtually unrecognizable from her life.

The childhood of the real Laura Ingalls differs significantly from the one described in the Little House books in ways that are potentially quite revealing. Most of her adult life is not as well-known, because the books end on the day when the fictional Laura gets married. So I was eager to tell the story of how she wrote these books during the Depression; how she arrived at her politics; and how she collaborated with her daughter. Those are very dramatic chapters in her life; as remarkable in some ways as the stories she chose to tell.

KM: As you mention early in your book, biographies of poor subjects are difficult for lack of records. As you say, “people of high status and position are likely to be rooted by their very wealth, protecting fragile ephemera in a manse or great home. They have a Mount Vernon, a Monticello, a Montpelier.” What was it like to research the Ingalls family, constantly on the move and seemingly always in poverty?

CF: The research was similar to the kinds of things that many of us do to learn more about our ancestors, searching through public records: federal and state censuses, military and church records, homesteading paperwork, property, tax, and bank records. That type of genealogical research can be tremendously rewarding. The fact that Charles Ingalls, Wilder’s father, for example, never served in the Civil War despite being prime age for militia service suggests that he may have sought to avoid the war. Public records also reveal the pattern of debts accrued by Laura and Almanzo Wilder during their early married life.

But these kinds of documents are limited, because they can’t reveal how people felt about their circumstances, or reacted to them. So, as with any biography, I had to piece out public documents with analysis of more personal things for hints about the Ingallses’ and Wilders’ emotional lives—photographs, poems, letters, diaries, articles, manuscripts.

KM: Discussions of factual truth versus emotional truth have become pressing recently. While the Little House series may not always be entirely accurate, You note that it is representative of Wilder’s emotional truth. Can you expand on some of the nuances of Wilder’s relationship with her childhood and memories?

CF: Wilder often said that her real motivation in writing the books was to memorialize her parents and their values, and it’s very clear that she elevated their heroism and stoicism in her portrait, leaving out things that might have cast them in a less-than-ideal light. This is true especially of her father. Her construction of a narrative that shows the family moving westward with a purpose is quite different from the reality, in which Charles Ingalls struggled to find jobs and put food on the table.

Their actual life had an aimless quality, and it’s clear that Laura Ingalls, as a child, often felt overwhelmed by their circumstances. The interesting thing about the books is that when you read them as a child, I think you focus on the cozy family and the happy endings. But when you read them as an adult, you start to pick up on some of those darker things in the background. So some of the more disturbing emotional truths did come through, even when Wilder may not have intended it.

KM: You credit Rose Wilder Lane, Wilder’s daughter, writing mentor, and very capable editor as Wilder’s catalyst to put her story to paper. But Lane was also a notorious yellow journalist with a tendency to write half-truths and outright lies about her subjects. What kind of influence did Rose’s editorial skills and background have on Wilder’s writing?

CF: Wilder spent several months visiting her daughter in San Francisco in 1915, where Lane had just taken a job working for the San FranciscoBulletin. Wilder had ostensibly come to see Rose and tour the world’s fair, the Panama-Pacific Exhibition, but she also wanted to become her daughter’s apprentice. So she was watching as Lane immersed herself in the world of yellow journalism, writing a fake “autobiography” of Charlie Chaplin and other serialized stories that were little more than dime novels. And the striking thing is that neither woman questioned the ethics behind this—in fact, Wilder told her husband that all these stories that Lane was embroidering or manufacturing were “true.”

This would have a huge impact on Wilder’s own work, first for a regional farm newspaper, the Missouri Ruralist, and ultimately in the Little House books, which present a unique mash-up of genres, including elements of memoir, biography, autobiography, and fiction. It’s very unusual to write a fictional memoir of yourself in the third person, as Wilder did, and the fact that she felt comfortable doing so came from her uncritical adoption of techniques used by her daughter.

KM: As you’ve said in past interviews, Little House books are children’s literature with a wide adult readership. What is it about these books that makes them so popular more than eighty years after their first publication?

CF: In terms of the way their reputation and readership have evolved, I often compare the Little House books to Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Twain, of course, was more aware of what he was doing, self-consciously satirizing and criticizing the institution of slavery. Wilder, I think, was more naïve. Less self-aware. But it’s that folk art quality, that guilelessness, that makes her portrait of settlers’ encounters with Indians in Little House on the Prairie such an unnerving and ultimately important work reflecting whites’ appropriation of native land and culture.

And her extended vision of pioneering and homesteading has been tremendously influential in shaping how generations of children and adults see that history. Many of Wilder’s most avid readers (including myself) have a connection to that past, because they come from farming families or emigrant families who settled in the Midwest.

But probably the biggest factor in the books’ enduring popularity is that they’re great stories, movingly told, evoking the warmth of Wilder’s family and her relationship to the land, which she loved.

KM: The Little House franchise, as you mention in the introduction, is a favorite among famous conservative politicians. You also describe how Wilder and Lane were increasingly conservative throughout the Dust Bowl. How does political-mindedness play into the books’ writing and legacy?

CF: When you consider the Little House legacy, I do think you have to distinguish between Wilder’s books and the TV show. Ronald Reagan’s fondness for the show, for example, has to have been connected in part to his own acting career in westerns and his relationship to Michael Landon, who was a friend and supporter. And I’m not sure that children come away from reading the books with a sense of a political message, which is largely confined to Pa’s anti-government outburst at the end of Little House on the Prairie, and the Fourth of July scenes in Farmer Boy and Little Town on the Prairie. They may well absorb Wilder’s insistence on the values ascribed to her parents—self-reliance, honesty, and integrity.

What’s fascinating to me—and which readers may not be as familiar with—is how Wilder and Lane reflected rural values in many farming communities as they reacted to the New Deal, vehemently denouncing government assistance. It’s especially astonishing when you realize that Wilder had worked for years for a government loan program and had herself taken advantage of favorable terms on a federal farm loan. But the intensity of their disgust with government wasn’t at all unusual, and it foreshadowed the political discourse that we have today.

KM: One of the things I loved most about your book is that while you disclose every truth about the Wilder family, their financial situations and social climate, it always seems fair, even warm to the individual. I sense a real love for the woman, her experience, and her work.

CF: I may not always agree with Wilder’s views or politics, and she wasn’t a perfect person (or perfect mother). No one is. She could be unthinking, even hard-hearted, by her own admission. Her portrayal of Native Americans is racist and traffics in stereotypes. But even with these flaws, which I don’t mean to trivialize, I think she was an extraordinary person, someone who faced truly heartbreaking struggle and persevered, at times heroically. Her work is a testament to the dignity of women’s labor. So yes, I do feel admiration and affection for her. And I continue to love her books.

Caroline Fraser was born in Seattle and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University in English and American literature. Formerly on the editorial staff of The New Yorker, she is the author of two nonfiction books, God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church and Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution, both published by Henry Holt's Metropolitan Books. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, Outside Magazine, and The London Review of Books, among other publications. She has received a PEN Award for Best Young Writer and was a past recipient of the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writer's Residency, awarded by PEN Northwest. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband, Hal Espen.

Kaitlin McManus is a writer in Brooklyn. Originally from Normal, Illinois (which is absolutely a real place), she is wrapping up an MFA in fiction at The New School. She's currently sweating over a novel-in-progress about drugs and emotional commodification.

Feiyi Xu, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Jack E. Davis about his book The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea (Liveright), which is among the final five selections in the category of Nonfiction for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

In his book, The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea, Jack E. Davis explores and reveals the Gulf’s diverse world in a unique perspective by combining its history and natural environment. He grew up on the Gulf, knows the Gulf, and loves the Gulf.

Feiyi Xu (FX): When did you have the idea of this book?

Jack E. Davis (JD): 2010, months before the BP oil spill.

FX: What is your primary motivation to write this book?

JD: I grew up on the Gulf and wanted to write a cultural and natural history of a sea largely overlooked in in the traditional narrative of American history. After the oil spill, I believed it was especially important to recapture the true identity of the Gulf, to present it for what it is, which is more than an oil sump and sunning beach.

FX: Did you choose the title, “The Gulf: The Making of American Sea”? Could you please explain it?

JD: Yes, I chose the title. As I explain in the book, there are both historical and ecological reasons for why I call the Gulf an American sea. When Thomas Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase, giving the US its first Gulf-front property, the Spanish, French, and British were freely sailing the Gulf. He and other elected officials believed the Gulf was rightfully an American sea, the control of which would solidify American dominion in the region. He wanted the US to acquire Cuba, and other presidents tried. Eventually, the US secured half the shoreline of the Gulf, sharing the other half with Mexico and Cuba, but the US has since controlled the sea, dominating the seafood industry, for example, and oil extraction.

As for the ecological reason, the Gulf is one of the richest estuarine environments in the world, and the estuaries of the Gulf tend to concentrate around the five US states. Most of the freshwater that flows to the Gulf, and that is central an estuarine environment, comes down rives from the US states. The best sport and commercial fishing has always been around the US states, which is not to say one cannot find good fishing off Mexico.

FX: The Gulf is a massive work with substantial history, topics, and other information. What did you do before you start writing?

JD: I have been writing books since the 1990s. The Gulf is my third solo-authored book. I have also been a history professor since the 1990s. Before then I worked in the business world, attended college, and served in the navy, which I joined out of high school because I wanted to go to sea and travel the world.

FX: Could you please give a brief introduction of the history of the Gulf of Mexico? For example, the history of the Gulf of Mexico is a history of…

JD: My book is a history of the human relationship with Gulf nature over the course of nearly ten thousand years. It focuses on the five US states and gives most of its attention to the 19th and 20th centuries and how the American relationship with the Gulf evolved over time. The book is not just about people who lived beside the Gulf and their interactions with the sea, but how all Americans interacted with the sea, even from distant places. People of the Northeast and Midwest are just as relevant in the history of the Gulf as those who have lived beside it.

FX: Your book has a unique perspective on exploring a landscape by digging into its history. You have published several environmental history books. What attracts you to combining nature and humanity? How do nature and humanity cooperate with each other?

JD: Landscape is a place constructed by humans. I am interested in nonhuman nature as a historical agent, how it has shaped the course of human history. Most historians treat nature as a physical backdrop to a human-driven story and disregard how nature impinges on human activities. I organized the book’s chapters around natural characteristics of the Gulf to emphasize the power and influence of the nonhuman world in the human experience.

FX: In your book, you discussed the growth coast, with houses, hotels, and condominium towers replacing vital natural vegetation in less than two decades. It has become a controversial topic that how can we balance environmental protection and economic growth. Could you please share your thoughts on this topic?

JD: We know how to achieve that balance; we just don’t give it much priority. As a common practice, the Gulf states and others connected to the Gulf by rivers, for example, dumped raw sewage into the bays and bayous of the Gulf until the 1970s and the Clean Water Act. We nearly killed many of those bays, wiped out the greater majority of their seagrass beds—vital to healthy productive estuaries. When we stopped, when we cleaned up these waters, they came back to life. More people live on these waters today, but nearly all are healthier than when fewer people lived beside them. Bird life I never saw as a kid, including the bald eagle, returned to Gulf shores because sea life was thriving again. We could roll back the Gulf of Mexico dead zone quite easily if we stopped sending agricultural effluent down the Mississippi River. We have learned to protect mangroves and coastal mashes and recognized the benefits to ourselves when we do. What we lack is the political will to be smart about living with nature by not polluting it, not managing it, not altering it, not re-engineering it, not putting concrete and asphalt where the living shoreline exists or should exist.

FX: In July 2017, Premier Oil said that about 1 billion barrels of oil had been discovered off Mexico’s coast. What will the oil discovery bring to the Gulf of Mexico?

JD: In a word, controversy. More oil will mean not only more drilling and platforms over the water but an expansion in the onshore infrastructure that supports extraction. As I argue in the book, the real environmental damage from the oil and gas industry comes from the onshore facilities.

Jack E. Davis is the author of the award-winning An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century, a dual biography of the America's premier wetlands and the woman who led a movement to save it. His latest book, The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, to be published by Liveright/W. W. Norton in March 2017, is a comprehensive history of the Gulf of Mexico from the Pleistocene to the present.

Davis, who writes mainly for an intellectually curious audience rather than an academic one, has been teaching history at the university level for more than two decades. In 2002-2003, he taught on a Fulbright award at the University of Jordan in Amman. He is now a professor of environmental history and sustainability studies at the University of Florida.

Tiziano Colibazzi, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Nuar Alsadir about her book Fourth Person Singular (Oxford University Press), which is among the final five selections in the category of Poetry for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

Tiziano Colibazzi (TC): Can you explain how you chose the title Fourth Person Singular?

Nuar Alsadir (NA): There was a period during which I was trying to figure out what kind of speaker to use. The poems I found most moving, which serves as my measure of a poem’s value, were written in the first person but, as I had developed an aversion to confessional poetry, I didn’t want to write about my life in a narrative, confessional way. I had been playing with the speaker in my poems, trying to figure out how I could keep the work lyric – have an “I” addressing a “you” – but not use an “I” that matched with me, the facts and narrative of my lived life.

As I was trying to figure out how I could write in the first person, but peel the emotion away from event that evoked it, in my sleep I heard my dream voice saying, “The fourth person singular exists in the fourth dimension.” When I woke up, I looked up the fourth dimension and the physics behind it, and I began to work out what the fourth person singular might be.

What began as an attempt to work out a fragment from sleep, had, in the end, broader implications. Four-dimensional space time—and there’s a diagram of this in my book—involves a moment in the present, which physicists call an event (P), and two light cones, the past light cone and the future light cone. The past light cone encompasses all the events in the past that can affect the moment in the present (P) by particles or waves traveling at or below the speed of light, and the future light cone encompasses all the moments in the future that can be affected by the moment in the present (P) by particles or waves traveling at or below the speed of light. Basically, the idea is that any moment in the present also includes a part of the immediate past and part of the immediate future.

All other events outside of the past and future light cones are in the elsewhere. An event in the elsewhere can enter our past or future light cones, but only after a lag—we don’t experience events in the elsewhere simultaneous to their occurrence. A classic example is if the sun were to suddenly lose all of its light, because the sun is in the elsewhere of the earth, it would take eight minutes before the event would travel from the elsewhere to our future light cone on earth and we would be able to perceive it.

The idea became relevant to me when I thought about it metaphorically, replaced the moment in the present’s letter P with the letter I, as in the first person. If the four-dimensional space-time model were applied to an individual, you could imagine events in the elsewhere of your psyche that you don’t feel the effects of simultaneous to their occurrence as nonetheless affecting who you are—the way a child, for example, can be influenced by the trauma of a parent even if it is never spoken about, or the sadness of someone sitting next to you on a train can affect you even if you don’t exchange words. This would force us to question our boundaries of self. Even if something happened long ago in a world you don’t share directly—or aren’t conscious of sharing—it can nonetheless influence your present in ways you may feel or experience but not know. This is the idea of quantum entanglement. And maybe also of humanity. The fourth person singular occupies this quantum-ly entangled position. I imagine the fourth person singular would be intuitively familiar to anyone who bridges worlds, such as an immigrant, the child of immigrant parents, someone from a different background than everyone around them, &c. I realize this may all sound very intellectual, but, to me, Fourth Person Singular is a very vulnerable book because taking up the position of the fourth person singular demands that you open the door to your interior.

TC: One aspect I found fascinating about your work is the use of redactions. Some words are redacted in a way that is not readable. In other cases, words are grayed out and can still be read with some effort. Can you talk about these choices?

NA: Maybe at some level, the redactions reflect the difficulty I had in baring myself completely. But also there were some things I knew needed to be in the book, though not necessarily in a completely legible form. They reflect, for me, the way the mind works, how it represses, with some things pushed all the way down into the unconscious, while others are only partially repressed and still accessible. They also reflect the way our world works—Washington Square Park, for example, has a burial field beneath it with something like 20,000 corpses still buried there. Without knowing this, as you cross the park, you may receive a transmission from that other level that you feel without necessarily being conscious of what you’re feeling. One of the fragments in my book describes something similar through Hemingway’s process:

Hemingway would record every detail around an event—say, a bomb exploding—then take out the event and leave only its reverberations. I have been walking through reverberations with no sense of what the event was.

I also record every detail, but, rather than taking out the event, I leave it in and redact—or partially redact—it. Like the unconscious, those redacted sections emit reverberations that play a role in the text’s meaning even if the content cannot be accessed directly. I believe this so strongly, in fact, that I was still editing what was beneath blacked-out lines after the book had been typeset.

TC: Your writing is part prose, part poetry. How would you describe it?

NA: I don’t think of poetry as being defined by form, but by effect. I elaborate on this in a piece I wrote for Granta about going to clown school while doing research for a book I’m writing on laughter. In it, I explore the connections between clown, psychoanalysis, poetry and political action. The instructor would refer to the moment when the audience felt moved as poetry. Of course, as a poet, I was jolted by that, thought about it quite a bit. But, ultimately, I agreed with him. You know something is poetry if you feel moved by it, if it stirs your interior. A piece of writing can look like a poem, use words that are considered poetic, but without the ability to pierce the reader, it’s what Derek Walcott termed a fake poem. I think of Fourth Person Singular as a book of poetry, but not a collection of poems.

TC: Your comments about Barthes and the way you described your experience of riding the Q train over the bridge as a « puncture » are very evocative. Is the act of writing a « puncture » for you?

NA: Definitely! It is that ability to puncture that makes something poetry. Barthes is talking about photographs there—he calls the studium the part of the photograph we understand, can connect to contexts of meaning we already know, and the punctum the part that pierces us, evokes understanding outside of systems of knowledge—the part that resonates with our interior and evokes a strong feeling. I am—in poetry and in life—more concerned with the punctum.

TC: How did you get from poetry to psychotherapy? Or was it the other way around?

NA: I’ve been writing poetry since I was a child (my first poem was published when I was nine). I used to think I had ESP because there were things I saw and felt—reverberations from beneath the surface—that no one around me was talking about. Poetry became the space where I could explore those kinds of perceptions freely.

TC: I enjoyed sketch 27 very much. The passenger on the train becomes an object subject to gravity. Can you tell more about how these sketches started?

NA: Thank you. I have a sketch book that’s separate from my notebook, which I carry around with me. Whenever I have a pocket of time, I sketch in it, mostly verbal sketches. It gives me a way of valuing all thoughts, feelings and perceptions equally, rather than seeing some as more weighty or meaningful than others. I am then free to find inspiration anywhere, even on the subway—maybe especially on the subway, as that’s where the knob to quantum entanglement is on high, which means I’m most likely to be punctured.

Nuar Alsadir is a poet, writer and psychoanalyst. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including 'Granta', 'The New York Times Magazine', 'Slate', 'Grand Street', the 'Kenyon Review', 'tender', 'Poetry London' and 'Poetry Review'; and a collection of her poems, 'More Shadow Than Bird', was published by Salt in 2012. She is on the faculty at New York University, and works as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York.

Tiziano Colibazzi is a poet in addition to being a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He is currently a first year MFA candidate for Poetry at The New School. Originally from Rome, Italy, Tiziano lives in NYC and he is the proud father of twin boys.

Avinash Rajendran, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed William Taubman about his book, Gorbachev: His Life and Times (W.W. Norton), which is among the final five selections in the category of Biography for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

In 2003 William Taubman released Khrushchev, a book over 10 years in the making. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award amongst others. Now, 15 years later, he is nominated yet again for an NBCC award for a masterfully well researched and beautifully written book on one of the most controversial Russian leaders: Mikhail Gorbachev.

Avinash Rajendran: Let me start by congratulating you for your NBCC nomination. Gorbachev: His Life and Times is a marvellous read. I can feel it breathe in my hands as I turn its pages.

William Taubman: Thank you very much. It is always a pleasure to hear from somebody who is a satisfied customer shall we say. [Laughter]

AR: It took you over 11 years to write this book. But it’s your first interview with Gorbachev that intrigues me. When you wrote to the Russian officials, they told you that Gorbachev would invite you if he felt like it. Not only did you get him to invite you, but you managed seven other personal interviews. What was that first meeting like and how did you prepare for it?

WT: Well first of all, there were three of us. My wife Jane Taubman is a professor of Russian language, literature and film at Amherst. She is now retired but she was present at all of the interviews. We both speak good Russian, but hers is even better than mine. She likes to joke that she has a way of charming Russians over the age of 75. So she was a great help. [Laughter]

But it’s quite true that we were told that we would have one interview with him and then he would make up his mind as to whether we would have more. I had two tactics or strategies for this interview. One was to begin almost every question by quoting something that he had said or written. I did this partly in order to prove that I had done my homework but also in the thought that it might lead him to say things he had not said before. The other strategy was to begin with his birth, his grandparents and his parents. I figured that we couldn't possibly, in one interview, get from 1931 up to the 1980s and so if we wanted us to cover his whole life, we would have to meet again. And so we did.

But the impression he made was of a remarkably warm, informal and natural person with a sense of humour. He did not ask us to provide him with the questions in advance. He did not insist on having his own interpreter present. Very relaxed conversation, very informative and it did indeed lead to seven more interviews.

AR: It is wonderful that he was able to meet you on such unofficial and friendly terms right at the beginning. That says a lot about him as a person. I assume you are eagerly awaiting his thoughts on your book, once it is translated to Russian.

WT: Yes, I certainly am. I would be very eager to hear what he thinks. I heard from the director of his foundation, after I sent him a copy, that he "thanks me from the heart" but that, you know, he doesn't read English. So I will have to wait to hear his impressions. I believe the Russian edition is coming out relatively soon.

AR: In Russian, this will be the first biography of Gorbachev of this scale right?

WT: It will be the first biography of Gorbachev of this scale. There is a very nice but shorter biography by a former aid of his named Andrei Grachev. I recently received, from the Russian hinterland, a bigger book called "Life of Gorbachev". I think mine is even bigger and more structured as far as I can tell. But certainly, there have not been many.

AR: Which is sad, but that is the bitter reality of his life.

WT: He is so controversial in Russia. There is such animus toward him by many and such devotion by relatively few that I think it probably deters anybody who would think of writing a biography.

AR: “Gorbachev is hard to understand”--these are Gorbachev’s own words with which you start your book. Grachev called him a “genetic error of the system." As readers, we enter the book with a morass of questions, the biggest of which is “How did he do so much so fast?” Do you think his father might have been right when he told him that he was growing too fast for his own good? Or was it a combination of that and the fact that his country was just not ready for him?

WT: Well I think, [pauses] you know this is a hard one and I know he has debated this with himself as to whether he moved too fast or too slow. I think, in the beginning, he thought it was a virtue to move slowly and to let the situation evolve. He thought the primordial sin of Bolshevism was to move too fast in trying to carry out a kind of political economical earthquake. He also thinks that Russian history is full of revolutionaries who were in too much of a hurry to change the world and too much blood was shed in an effort to do so. So he always thought of himself, as “making a revolution by evolutionary means.”

As he got into trouble in the initial period after he was ousted, he decided he should move faster. That he should have broken with the communist party sooner. He should have given more power to the republics. But now, looking back 25 to 30 years later, he is on record as saying he thinks it may take decades to democratize Russia. And in one quote several years ago, he said it might take the whole 21st century. That certainly sounds as if he has come around the view that he moved too fast.

AR: In the book you mention that he feels the Russians may need a period in the desert like the Jews did with Moses. How far does he think they have come? What kind of a leader does he envision will help Russia today?

WT: I think the Jews and Moses parallel has to do with Russia needing time in the desert to get used to being a democratic country. It cannot emerge from slavery overnight and become the kind of county he wants it to be. But as to what happens now for the rest of the 21st century, it is hard to say. I know in 2011, for example, when massive demonstrations broke out in Moscow, Petersburg and other cities when Putin seemed to be rigging the elections, he sounded suddenly euphoric as if, maybe, it wouldn’t take so long after all. I think he tries to brace himself to the fact that it may take decades, but he is always susceptible to the hope that it could take much less than that.

AR: When Gorbachev’s wife Raisa was on her death bed and Gorbachev was taking care of her, he brought her a newspaper one day to read her a surprisingly positive article that had been written about them. I will never forget her response, she said, "It tuns out you have to die to be understood." Do you think the Russians will make the same mistake with Gorbachev?

WT: That is a very good question. In the short run, the question is: how will they react to his death? If they follow the pattern which they did when Raisa died, they will be very moved by his death and much more sympathetic towards him after he is gone.

In the longer run, it won’t be so much a question of how they are reacting in the moment to his passing, but it will be: how will he look 40 or 50 years from now? I think it depends which way Russia goes. The public opinion polls already seem to indicate that the young people are particularly likely to admire him. Those who have been able to build lives for themselves realise that he opened the door that made that possible. Whereas a lot of older people who suffered through the bad times of the late 80s and the 90s still tend to blame him. So I think in the long run, if Russia ends up on a Democratic path, they may look back at him as one of the founders. On the other hand, if it continues to suffer from political repression and occasional economic disasters, they may look back and say he is the one, along with Yeltsin, who started the bad times.

AR: When Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize, he used the money from the prize to buy computers for a newspaper called Novaya Gazeta which is still in circulation. Do the Russian people associate him with that? Has that helped at all in reviving their opinion about him?

WT: He is a co-owner of it. And as far as I know, it is one of the few if not the only liberal newspaper. The one most likely, these days, to tell the truth. It has a courageous editor named Sergey Kozheurov and I am sure that liberal minded Russians read it and appreciate it and probably know that Gorbachev is associated with it. But I don't know its circulation. I suspect it’s fairly low. It’s certainly not in the tens of millions or even millions.

AR: Let us talk about Raisa Gorbachev. She was perhaps his strongest advocate. She supported him as an adviser, a philosopher and a friend. I wonder if he would have turned out the way he did if not for her?

WT: You are quite right. She was strong and in some ways stronger than he, but she was also vulnerable. More so than he was. This woman was the first modern Soviet Russia's first lady. Smart, stylish and sophisticated. Eager to appear with him in public. Eager to advise him on all matters. It turns out in the end that she was temperamentally not suited for that role. Because as he came under more and more criticism, as the country got worse and worse, it became more and more painful for her. In that sense, she was vulnerable and I think that helps to explain his really poignant remark after she died, when he says, "I did her in."

AR: Those pages in the book are difficult to read without getting emotional. Especially when they are followed with an image of Gorbachev, with his face in his hands, crying. It was just the most heart-breaking portion of the book.

WT: I am smiling, only because I was hoping to convey just such a notion.

AR: When you research a person like Gorbachev, I am sure the information you end up with is large and you need to somehow funnel all of that into one book. I imagine, at this point, writing turns into a process of selection – What do you keep and what do you leave out? What did you use as your guiding light?

WT: My process was to try to read enough in the beginning, to come up with a sense of an overall arc to his life and identify what the chapters would be that would develop that story and then I did most of my research about particular chapters. In other words, I did not read everything and then start writing them. From the beginning, I had the sense that I was dealing with a heroic story that was also a tragic story. As I worked through chapter by chapter, it seemed to take shape. And that is the shape it took.

William Taubman, the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Amherst College, is the author of the just-published Gorbachev: His Life and Times. His biography, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. Also the author of Stalin’s American Policy: From Entente to Détente to Cold War, and co-author with his wife, retired Amherst College professor of Russian Jane Taubman, of Moscow Spring, William Taubman was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in 2009 and chairs the Academic Advisory Committee of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. He has received the Karel Kramar Medal of the Czech Republic and the Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Avinash Rajendran is a first-year MFA student at The New School. In his previous life, he was an Engineer and a closet writer. He loves New York and is passionate about Theatre, Philosophy, Education, and Literature. He is currently working with his agent on editing his first book, The Sins of Innocence. He blogs at Penthrall.com. You can find him on Twitter @avinashrajendr

Lucas Mautner, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Alice McDermott about her book, The Ninth Hour (FSG), which is among the final five selections in the category of Fiction for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott follows the lives of several Catholic women living in early-twentieth-century Brooklyn. When Annie’s husband commits suicide, she is left with few choices, especially since she is pregnant with their child. Due to the kindness of Sister St. Saviour, a nun whose vocation is to help the poor and sick, Annie begins to work at the convent, where her daughter Sally is born. The lives of Annie, Sally, Sister St. Saviour, Sister Illuminata, and others reveal pain and suffering, penance and salvation, and, most importantly, the often-ignored sacrifice that these women and their contemporaries made.

Lucas Mautner (LM):There were so many incredible historical details in this book: the description of the chamber pot, the laundry, the information about the various orders of nuns. Can you describe your research process while writing this book?

Alice McDermott (AD): Research is a siren song for novelists—or at least for this one. So easy to be lured into hours and days of research, uncovering all kinds of fun facts, (and feeling like a very serious writer indeed, almost a journalist) while not a single sentence meant for readers gets written. To avoid this, and to avoid a novel chock full of all those fun facts that, in truth, don't need to be in the novel at all, I try to write as much of the story as I can before I start to research—taking a best-guess at historical details just to get the voice and the rhythm and the people of the novel down first. I then have some idea not only of what I'm looking for in my research, but also of who my characters are, whose perception will serve as filter to the historical information. Then I read widely, and, I'll admit, somewhat sloppily. While reading about substitutes in the Civil War, I also read laundry guides from the early part of the 20th Century, newspapers from the era (especially the women's pages and the want ads). I read historical accounts of the founding of any number of Catholic women's religious orders, accounts of immigrant women's lives, and St. Therese of Lisieux's Story of a Soul. I read about train travel, nursing care, and fundraising. More often than not, I find my best-guesses are pretty good—mostly, I think, because they are informed by my characters and their circumstances. I find that if I labor to get my characters to the page with some vividness, I'm surprised by how much I seem to know about their lives . . . something of the unconscious at work in this, I suppose.

LM:So much of this novel focuses on figures of family myth. Red Whelan, who took Mr. Tierney’s place in the Civil War; Jim, Sally’s father who, unaware to her, committed suicide while she was still in the womb; Sister St. Saviour, who was like a legendary figure to the family of Sisters. Successive generations hear these stories. How does the idea of a family myth travel from generation to generation, and in what ways does it shape a family’s narrative? Were you thinking about these familial stories as you wrote the book?

AM: Very much so. The collective voice of the narrators here speaks exactly to this family myth-making, which I think is akin to faith-making. Faith, much like family lore, comes to us in a variety of ways—through story, anecdote, speculation, imagination, memory, even research—and both require the willingness to believe in things unseen . . . I know with certainty, for instance, that I had a great-great-grandmother, that she lived, walked the earth, experienced childhood and motherhood and death, but I've never seen her, or met anyone who has. That the narrators of The Ninth Hour see a past they didn't actually live through with such certainty and vividness is a reflection, I think, of the capacity of those with religious faith to find the unseen more certain, and more compelling, than the world before their eyes, or in their personal memory.

LM:One of the most memorable quotes in the book is, “There is a hunger,” when one of the Sisters is explaining Annie’s actions to Sally. Is there a relationship between faith and this intrinsically human hunger, and is there a way (or a need) to balance the two?

AM: Sister Illuminata, whose quote this is, also adds, "A hunger to be comforted." I agree that this hunger is intrinsically human. I think it's intrinsic to faith as well. (For who are the faithful if not humans?) Faith arises out of this hunger: the hunger to love, the hunger for justice, and the hunger to redeem suffering, to be reconciled to our mortality.

LM:The women in this book must band together as a community to survive. From the young widows left penniless and with no prospects, to the Sisters whose accomplishments are hijacked by priests, to the abused wives who turn to the nuns for help, women must turn to each other not only for emotional and physical support, but for survival. Can you speak a bit more about this dynamic?

AM: At a time when there was no social safety net, when ordinary women's lives were even less valued than they are today, women were often left to their own devices. The incredible accomplishments of religious women in this country—the schools, universities, hospitals they established, many of them focused on the needs of women—goes grossly unacknowledged even today. (The Mayo Clinic was started by nuns, for instance.) Instead, we still have jokes about nuns in classrooms, hitting kids with rulers. (Looking at you, Saturday Night Live.) I see this as a particularly insidious form of misogyny.

LM:Sister Lucy tells Sally, “If we could live without suffering, we’d find no peace in heaven.” Suffering is central to the Catholic faith, and central to this book as well. What is the relation between suffering and faith, and how do the two affect your characters’ lives?

AM: Suffering is central to the Catholic faith, but suffering is also an inevitable experience for all of us who are human. Those of us without faith either avoid this notion (until we have to) or throw up our hands—what are you going to do? People of faith, it seems to me, are at least willing to acknowledge the injustice of this, the way suffering is visited upon us all, especially the innocent. Sister Jeanne's homely theodicy about justice and suffering speaks to this. Her confidence in eternal life as a recompense for suffering may be an antique notion, but at least she's thinking.

LM:Catholics who commit suicide were ineligible to be buried in a Catholic cemetery. When Jim commits suicide, Sister St. Saviour does her best to deceive the Church and have the doomed man buried in hallowed ground. Why does the Sister work so hard to get Jim buried in a Catholic plot? Is this out of pity for Jim, or Annie?

AM: Sister St. Saviour understands the injustice of the Church's rule regarding the burial of suicides in hallowed ground. Because she understands human nature—because she has spent her life among humans—she knows that his death is not due to lack of love, or faith but, in her own assessment, depression—the suicide's inability to go on through just one more day. I don't see her determination to have him buried in a Catholic cemetery as driven so much by pity (although that's part of it) as it is driven by her conviction that the Church is wrong. That this rule lacks Christian compassion.

Of course, the Church has since dispensed with this rule because science has taught us so much about mental illness. There are other obsolete and unkind rules the Church may yet dispense with—I'm pretty sure most Catholic women know what they are.

LM:Some of the most striking passages were focused on gross details of illness or dirtiness. I’m thinking of the woman on the train, whose dirty mind and unclean body frightens Sally, or of Mrs. Costello, whose illness and all its gory details are presented in vivid detail to the reader. What was behind your decision to ground this book in these physical details? In a book where faith and godliness is central to the story, what is the role of the human body in all its gross detail?

AM: I think all realistic fiction is grounded in physical details. I don't know how I could write an honest novel featuring nursing nuns who care for the sick poor without precise details of their daily work. I guess I don't see these as gory details - only the facts of illness and accident and poverty, of human suffering. I see these physical realities as reason to be astonished by the compassion and the strength of these women—their faith and godliness, if you will. Again, I fear our culture's marginalization of such women—as classroom witches or bodiless singing nuns—allows us to smugly dismiss what difficult work they've done—and continue to do.

LM:Sister St. Saviour utters this utterly amazing quote: “It would be a different Church if I were running it.” How would the Church be different if it were run by women?

AM: For Sister St. Saviour, I think, women running the Church would mean a more compassionate hierarchy, a Church that places love and understanding, forgiveness and patience ahead of dogma and ritual and rule-of-(canon) law. A more warm-hearted, and practical, Church. I agree with her.

LM:The dialogue truly shines in the novel, from the Sister who says pernt instead of point, to the randy woman on the train, who wriggles her pinky finger and asks Sally, “Can you imagine a girl the size of me spending her life riding a thing the size of that?” How did you approach dialogue in this book? How did you strike a balance between historical accuracy and modern readers’ ease of understanding?

AM: I love Elizabeth Bowen's advice that characters should only speak when they have to—it's a reminder to listen for the character's voice, not to manipulate it.

I think the real challenge in writing about the past is not so much vocabulary, context can be a simple fix for that, but the danger of applying a kind of "presentism" to another era. Keeping a larger context in mind is helpful here as well. One must be aware of the breadth of a character's experience in a certain time and place in order to understand her mindset, her choices, her view of the world.

LM: What inspired you to write a book focusing on the community of women in the Church?

AM: I began with a focus on substitutes in the Civil War, as a metaphorical conceit. This led me to thoughts of selflessness, self-sacrifice, how we value these notions in the 21st Century. If we value them. If we even understand them. Which led me to think about the giving of a life so that another might live—and also of taking a life, even if it's your own, with no regard for how others will then live. Story began to arise out of these notions, and along came Sister St. Saviour . . .

Alice McDermott is the author of seven previous novels, including After This; Child of My Heart; Charming Billy, winner of the 1998 National Book Award; At Weddings and Wakes; and Someone—all published by FSG. That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This were all finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.

Lucas Mautner is an MFA Creative Writing (Fiction) student at The New School in New York City. He is a graduate of Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn.

Beatrice Helman, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Frank Ormsby about his book, The Darkness of Snow (Wake Forest University Press), which is among the final five selections in the category of Poetry for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

Beatrice Helman: When I was in kindergarten, my family moved from an apartment to our first ever house, and my very first yard. A giant rhododendron had been growing for years before we got there, and it was immediately my own personal world, big enough that I could climb underneath and hang out for hours. Before we get into a few other questions about your lovely poems, I would love to just start out talking about Rhododendrons, if you could just talk about where it came from, why you chose to honor such a beautiful but scrubby plant, what special place it holds.

Frank Ormsby: I grew up in a rural area of County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland, near a village called Irvinestown. My mother’s family owned a small farm and we often helped with the farming work. Close by was Castle Irvine (sometimes called Necarne Castle), which was uninhabited but surrounded by a larger farm and extensive woods. As children, we played in these woods. The half-mile avenue from the gate to the castle had trees on both sides, mostly rhododendrons, which were popular on the larger estates. So farmland and trees made up my essential landscape. No mountains or rivers of any size. However, look for Co. Fermanagh on a map of Ireland and you will see that Lough Erne seems to cover the whole county. We lived some distance from it but did not own a car, so the lough did not figure prominently in my boyhood. I think that my rural poems are an attempt to recover the sensuous aspects of growing up in the country – the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures of my world. I would want the reader to experience that world vividly, the way you have experienced the rhododendrons.

BH: Do you find yourself consciously or unconsciously drawn to elevating ordinary things and experiences to the extraordinary?

FO: I do have the impulse, both consciously and unconsciously, to discover the extraordinary in the ordinary. This impulse is often the intensity that generates a poem.

BH: I think we have to talk about the completely wondrous section on painting, because wow. This kind of concentrated examination that involved multiple voices was something new to me and I absolutely fell head over heels for it. Was it a conscious decision to write from so many perspectives?

FO: Paintings have this effect on me also. The twenty-six included in “The Darkness of Snow” all prompted poems. I did not have to force inspiration. The use of multiple voices was also spontaneous. The poems assumed their voices without much pressure from me – though the fact that I’ve always loved dramatic monologue as a form may have nudged me in that direction in a number of poems. To speak from someone else’s point of view is, creatively, a healthy challenge. It is likely to close the gap between speaker and reader and increase the immediacy of the poem.

BH: Which were you most drawn to?

FO: I was particularly drawn to a number of individual paintings. John Lavery’s “Under the Cherry Tree” is popular on this side of the Atlantic. There are reproductions by the Ulster Museum and Art Gallery in Belfast – we have had a copy hanging on our wall for years. Among my favourite also, “The Christmas Party” by Aloysius Kelly, “Madonna Lilies” by Norman Garstin and Joseph Malachy Kavanagh’s “Pursuing His Gentle Galling”. The Kavanagh painting connected imaginatively and unexpectedly with the theme of the lost father which runs through all my books. The fact that one of the paintings is a portrait of a “Miss Ormsby” opened the possibility of a humorous poem and I enjoyed poking fun at male pomposity and self-importance in William John Leech’s “Interior of a Barber’s Shop”, possibly the most extended use of irony in the entire collection.

BH: I actually fell so in love with Norman Garstin’s “Madonna Lilies” that I had to look it up on the internet. Can you talk a little about the process behind this poem in particular?

FO: One of the most satisfying aspects of writing poetry is that, sooner or later, you find yourself producing a poem that does not seem quite yours, that takes on a life of its own. Examples from my earlier book are “Apples, Normandy, 1944” and “Bog Cotton” – “Madonna Lilies” by Norman Garstin is in this category. It still reads for me like a poem written by someone else. There is nothing I can usefully say about the process behind the poem, except that, for me, it is humorous, that it has a certain impetus that kept renewing itself as the poem emerged. It is a kind of secular prayer in which desire and purity are played off against one another, creating both pleasure and discomfort in the speaker?

BH: I noticed that there are quite a few shorter poems in this collection. I love short poems! How do they differ for you as compared to longer poems, in terms of process or purpose?

FO: I’ve always had a taste for the shorter poem, particularly as practised by the haiku poets of China and Japan. Yet another form of poetic satisfaction – finding the image that will set 17 syllables ringing, surrendering to the ripples that spread from the centre of the pond to the furthest edges. Michael Longley had been a major influence in this respect and when I revise a poem these days, it is usually a matter of cutting. I now have a section in each collection, called “Small World”, which is the haiku section. There is probably no point in comparing very long and very short poems. I suppose that, in some ways, forms like haiku are somewhat limited, yet the ambition to write a perfect haiku is about as ambitious as you can get.

BH: You are a master at using humor in your writing, and you use it beautifully in The Parkinson’s Poems. I love the very first line of the entire section in Agitans, “My left arm is jealous of my right, the one without a tremor.” To what purpose do you find yourself using humor in your writing, and in this section of poems?

FO: Black humour is evident in all my books. Reviewers seemed to find the earlier books death – absorbed and grim, choosing to ignore the comic elements. They have become more aware of this strand and the sequence of “Parkinson’s Poems” in particular seems to have got them smiling. That was the intention. I had a strong sense of the effectiveness of black humour as an antidote to disease, pain, depression. It also counters turgidity and the kind of po-faced seriousness, which is among the enemies of lively poetry.

BH: What finally brought you to writing poems about your experience with Parkinson’s? Do you find writing about Parkinson’s helpful personally, or do you write for the reader in these poems?

FO: There is a kind of pressure that brings itself to bear on some aspects of your experience but not others. In 2009 I spent three weeks in hospital with heart failure and felt under no pressure at all to write about it. Two years later I was diagnosed as having Parkinson disease and began writing about it immediately. Why? Whatever the reasons, I found the Parkinson’s poems flowing freely, requiring little revision on the whole. The experience of writing the poems gave me a sense of being in control of my life. Even if that is an illusion, it can be an enabling one.

BH: I love the paradox of the title - how did you settle on this line as the one that would lead you to the title of the entire collection?

FO: You’ve got the answer in the first part of your question! Paradox comes closest to embodying the complexities of things. As a mode of expression, it is usually compact and memorable. The book has five very different sections so it was impossible to come up with an appropriate cover design and title. When I thought of “the darkness of snow”, I was so pleased with it that I let it stand. It suggests that what is attractive and beautiful in the world is never entirely without its darker, uglier side.

BH:What is your day to day writing process? Do you find you work better at a certain time of day, after a certain routine?

FO: My wife is a full-time teacher and I have been retired for eight years. This means that most days I have the house for myself from approximately 9.00am to 3.30pm. I work obsessively (one of the side effects of medication) on poems or read a little. There are very few parts of the day when I am not working on a poem, either at my desk or when I go walking in North Belfast. My Belfast landscapes are Cavehill, which looks like a face-profile and is known locally as Napoleon’s Nose, and the Waterworks Park. Since 2015 I’ve had the most productive period of my life. Again, I am drawn to speculate that my various illnesses – you may add diabetes and sleep apnea to Parkinson’s Disease – have produced a kind of urgency, not exactly a sense of time running out but certainly a desire to get whatever poetry is there down on the page.

BH: Who are a few other Irish poets who you’re drawn to, and whose work you feel has informed your own?

FO: Among the other contemporary Irish poets to whose poetry I am attracted are Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson and Paul Durcan. This is not an exhaustive list. I’m reading the latest collections by a number of younger Irish poets e.g. David Wheatley, Conor O’Callaghan. I enjoy detective fiction and am planning to catch up with some of my favourites – Jams Lee Burke, Sue Grafton, Donna Leon and Ian Rankin.

BH: When you’re feeling stuck, just totally blocked and know writing isn’t happening that hour or that day, what do you do?

FO: It’s years since I’ve had that experience but if I did find my inspiration “totally blocked” I would probably dip into the work of poets who have been an inspiration from the start – the New Zealand poet Fleur Adcock, the English poet Hugo Williams, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, various haiku poets. Or I might turn to poets such as Billy Collins and Wendy Cope for their humour and lightness of touch. Or I might leaf through my poetry notebooks in search of unfinished or discarded poems that could be salvaged.

BH: I read somewhere, I think in an interview on “The Belfast Telegraph,” that you used to listen to Elvis with your sisters. Can we just talk about Elvis for a second? I’ve recently been watching old Elvis movies and they’re so fascinating. The soundtrack to “Blue Hawaii” is constantly on in our home…

FO: The first radio (or, as we called it, wireless) that we had in the house was provided by a welfare organisation after my father had had a stroke. He listened exclusively to Irish music and Irish singers on the Radio Eireann station and despised rock ‘n’ roll. When he went to bed, we listened, with some excitement, to Radio Luxemburg – Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Big Bopper, Buddy Holly and of course Elvis. My father’s verdict on Elvis was “That boy can sing none”.

Frank Ormsby was born in 1947 in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, and educated at Queen’s University in Belfast. He was Head of English at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution for thirty-four years and is now retired. His published volumes include Ripe for Company (1971), A Store of Candles (1977), A Northern Spring (1986), The Ghost Train (1995), and Fireflies (2009).

Beatrice Helman is an MFA candidate at The New School, concentrating in fiction. She is a writer and photographer based out of Brooklyn, NY. You can find her work in some cool magazines, like Gather Journal and The Messy Heads, and on her website at www.beatricehelman.com.

Felicity LuHill, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Masha Gessen about her book, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (Riverhead), which is among the final five selections in the category of Nonfiction for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

Felicity LuHill (FL):This book intertwines stories of seven protagonists, which is akin to a novel, and has contextual information, which is similar to a textbook, but the tone overall feels very personal, like you're relating this epic story. What was your process for coming up with this structure?

Masha Gessen (MG): I usually do this with books: I know what my objectives are and I know what the topic is, and then I'm just reporting. I walk around for a bit, literally, bike and walk, and then suddenly, I get an idea of what it should be, what the structure is. So I can't tell you how I came up with this, but I can tell you what my objectives were. The book is really about trauma, but I didn't want to say the word “trauma.” I wanted to make people feel the trauma, and in order for people to feel the trauma but also learn, I needed to write a book in a way that's very different from the way nonfiction books are generally written. There's nothing wrong with the way nonfiction books are generated. I've written nine, and most of them have been your standard nonfiction book. My next one will not be structured like this, like a novel. But the way I think about it is that nonfiction books are usually told from the middle distance. The narrator is somewhere in the vicinity of their characters, but on the outside, right? So, you get to look at the characters from the outside, and you also get to observe events up close, but not too close, not from the inside.

I wanted to do what novels do, and novels do zero distance and bird's eye distance, but not middle distance, usually. In a novel, you have the interior view and you have the bird's eye view. So that's what I tried to do. The parts that you referred to as a textbook, I think of them as the war parts in War and Peace. Where it's like the movement of troops and the other parts are like the peace parts. I'm not comparing myself to Tolstoy, I'm just saying that that's like the ultimate way to think about a novel, is to think in shifting interior and bird's eye view frames. For example, none of my protagonists are ever quoted, because you're inside their heads, and none of them is described. None of them is physically described for the very reason that I didn't want you to ever step out of the inside of their heads, unless it was to zoom way out. That was my objective.

FL:In terms of having a distanced view of something, you talk a lot about how Western scholars tend to define terms in ways that are not necessarily correct. I'm thinking particularly in terms of the fall of the Soviet Union and also these different definitions and descriptions of totalitarianism. How do you think your experience helps shape your notions of these concepts?

MG: I'm not saying that Western scholars don't define these things correctly. In fact, I wouldn't be able to write a book if it weren't for the work of Western scholars. I think part of the book is an intellectual history. So I trace different ideas and different ways of thinking about these phenomena, and try to build on them. I'm by no means saying that people are wrong about the way that they interpreted the fall of the Soviet Union. I think that there are a number of ways to tell that story. I think each of those ways has its useful elements and its flaws. Some of them are more useful than others, but I didn't actually cite any models that I think are wrong. I just think they're all differently useful, as for the fall of the Soviet Union. As for totalitarianism, that's a somewhat different story. That's an evolving concept. I'm trying to make an argument for viewing what's happening in Russia now as a kind of totalitarian. But most of the writing about totalitarianism has concerned the establishment of the totalitarian regime. Whereas the case that I'm making is that I'm looking at the lived experience of totalitarianism, and that the conditions for creating the lived experience of totalitarianism are distinct. They can be the same as the conditions for establishing a totalitarian regime, but they can also be different. And in this particular case, we're not watching the establishment of a totalitarian regime. But it is the lived experience of totalitarianism. And so that's why I have that long chapter where I go through all the different definitions of totalitarianism, the point is not to argue with them but to sort of say, look, this is how the definition of totalitarianism has evolved, and this is me making the case for applying this very important concept to this thing that I'm trying to describe.

FL:How did you decide on the four main young characters that are talked about in this book? You’ve mentioned previously that they all have an articulated relationship with power, but don't directly have power themselves. I would say, too, that they all have an interesting relationship with politics that fluctuates. They're all forced to confront politics in often very personal ways. How did you decide on these people? What was your process for researching them?

MG: I thought about what I wanted to highlight. There's an idea in nonfiction, “writing of the representative character,” which I think is a terrible idea. It misrepresents the way humanity works. Nobody represents other people, and looking for representative characters, especially characters that represent an entire society is just an inhuman way of approaching reporting. I'm heading off a criticism that I've heard that these people are not representative. But I didn't think of them as representative. I thought of them as people whose stories would allow me to highlight certain things that I wanted to tell about. And so I wanted to tell about the class stratification about Soviet and post-Soviet societies, so I really needed people from different socioeconomic classes. Lyosha grew up pretty close to poverty. So there’s Lyosha all the way up to Seryozha who grew up in extreme privilege, the ultimate privilege that you can have in Soviet society and post-Soviet society. And I needed somebody who had proximity to post-Soviet power, so that's where Zhanna comes in.

On the other hand…I wanted people whose lives had changed drastically as a result of the crackdown. So by definition these were not going to be pro-Putin Russians. Their oppositional politics are very, very different, and I wanted that, but I wanted all of them to be able to reflect on that point in 2012, as a turning point in their lives. I wanted one of them to be gay, because I needed to write about the anti-gay campaign. But when I first started out, one of the people that I was going to talk to was somebody who still lives there, and I realized it was going to be too hard for me to get him to be as open as I needed him to be for this book. I also have this obsession with people who were children in the 1990s. So that's how the age was determined.

Once I had these criteria in my mind, that's when I started sifting through my mental Rolodex, and thinking of all the people I know, and who might be a) interesting and b) interested, because an important criteria is that they had to be people who would be willing to sit down with me for endless hours and answer really bizarre questions, because my goal was to write this from inside their heads. Not a lot of people actually have great tolerance for it. And the way it ended up happening was that it was an exercise they were really invested in. It was a kind of reckoning at a difficult time in their lives, and so it was almost like therapy, these interviews. They all have feelings, because it's a pretty odd, strange, and huge demand to make on somebody.

FL:You talk about the crackdown on gay people, but towards the beginning of the book, one of the first mentions of gay people in Russia is the gay film festival of 1991. It's such an interesting juxtaposition to see that and then later see Lyosha basically forced out of Russia because of his sexuality.

MG: The contrast is huge. That's part of what the book is about. It traces the route from that incredibly promising, almost shocking openness to people having to flee for their lives.

I actually organized that film festival, and like Lyosha I had to flee the country in 2013, about six months before Lyosha did. So that story I know it intimately. The first time I went to Moscow in March 1991 was in part to talk to activists who had asked me to help organize this festival, and I thought, “That's insane! There's no way that they're going to be allowed to get away with it,” and they were. I had had this incredible high of crossing the border with all these films and being able to announce these films from the stage, at the movie theater in Moscow, and it was incredible. It felt so heady. It felt like the future was ours. And then a mere 22 years later, there I was hightailing it out of Russia.

FL:Social media plays a really important part of the protesting process. How do you think social media has shaped the landscape of Russia today?

MG: I don't think it's shaped the landscape. I think it’s actually a mistake to put social media that way. I think it’s an amplification. It makes things more audible and it speeds things up. But it does not create the landscape, and it does not create connections that don't exist on the planet. It can amplify them.

FL:In the book there's also a large section that talks about privilege, and privilege is such a hot topic in the United States now. I was wondering if you had any opinions about privilege and the way that it's discussed and thought about in Russia and during the Soviet Union versus the way that it's talked about today in Western culture.

MG: I spend a fair amount of time in the book on privilege because I feel like it deserves a lot of attention. There's a misconception in the United States that the Soviet Union was a classless society and an egalitarian society and it was anything but. That misconception has been actually weaponized by Kremlin propaganda very effectively, both inside and outside of Russia, because there's this idea that inequality was created by economic reforms of the 1990s, and that’s crazy. Inequality was baked into Soviet society, it was incredibly regimented, and that's why I spend so much time explaining just how segmented it was, and how inequality was a very important instrument of social and political control. Post-Soviet inequality has a lot more in common with American inequality than Soviet inequality did. But Russian inequality has deep structural roots in Soviet inequality, just as contemporary American inequality has these deep structural roots in historical inequality. Talking about inequality without talking about history is stupid, and a dead-end conversation.

FL:You have to have a historical context.

MG: It's not just that you have to have an historical context. You can't understand inequality unless you understand how Russian inequality stems from Soviet class structure, or how American inequality stems from institutions of slavery and segregation, and all the economic mechanisms that were created to maintain racial inequality and gender inequality.

FL:So where were you in the process of writing and publishing this book when Trump was running for and elected president? What was it like knowing how relevant this book would become in the United States?

MG: So, I finished writing it in September 2016, and it was pretty bizarre, because that basically means that I started writing it around the start of the campaign. I don't know how it works for other writers, but I know for a lot of people it works in a fairly similar way, where first you write slowly, and then the last half of the book, when all the research is done and the structure's in place, it's almost like a surgical process. I write as fast as I physically can for the second half of the book, because it's all there, you just have to get the words down and in the correct order. That was the journey from the beginning of July, till the middle of September 2016—that's both conventions and then the debates. I was done with that very intense surgical process, and had it on my desk and thought, “Oh my God. I just did a lot of relevant research.” I was convinced that Trump was going to win all along, not because I'm such a brilliant predictor of things, but because that's what was preoccupying me, and because I think once that thing appears on the horizon, it's going to happen. All this thinking about totalitarianism was in some ways going to become relevant, which was bizarre, because I thought I was writing a really niche book.

Masha Gessen is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of several books, among them The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. The recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Fellowship, Gessen teaches at Amherst College and lives in New York City.

Felicity LuHill is a Second Year Creative Writing MFA Candidate at The New School. She is also the Deputy Editor for The Inquisitive Eater. Along with The Inquisitive Eater and The New School Creative Writing Blog, her writing has been published with Barbershop Books, Healthy Materials Lab, and Enchantress Magazine, where she was also an editor. Felicity appreciates writing in all forms. You can find her on Twitter @charmingfelic

Darren Lyons, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Kevin Young about his book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News (Graywolf), which is among the final five selections in the category of Criticism for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

Bunk is author Kevin Young’s deeply-researched book on the history of the hoax in all its forms, from humbug to plagiarism, and on to “fake news.” The book relates these hoax phenomena to the major issues we face today, issues of stereotyping, race, and gender. It’s a deeply-affecting book that’s directly relevant to understanding our contemporary reality, and it offers a lens for moving forward.

Darren Lyons: Congratulations on your National Book Critics Circle Award nomination. I really enjoyed your book, Bunk. It was a game-changer for me, and we’ll get into that in the interview.

Kevin Young: Thanks.

DL: You’re welcome. First of all, immediately from the first chapter, it was my impression that you’d written this book with a poet’s eye, your close attention to the meanings and derivations of words, the often-humorous turns-of-phrases. Was this a conscious effort on your part, to style the book in this way?

KY: I think I’m a poet no matter what. I think it just happens that way, but the advantage is, besides the things you mentioned, I also hope that it means that I’m thinking about the connections, and I think poets make metaphors, which is a kind of connection, and that’s what I was trying to do with this book.

DL: Yeah, I definitely got that feeling immediately. A thread you follow throughout the book is the link between hoaxes and stereotypes, particularly related to race and gender. Can you talk a little about that?

KY: Yeah. I think the hoax tries to use shortcuts to get us to believe it, or at least, to fall for it for a little while, and I feel like stereotypes are a way it does it. I think a hoax is often making use of race and is always interested in the deep divisions that divide us, in society, and this is just one more example of using these stereotypes, but they’re just a form of cliché and shorthand that lets them not have to say much, but say it all.

DL: A common quote cited about/from your book is that “race is the most dangerous hoax of them all.” I got the impression that these hoaxes you document feed on racism, but then race feeds back into the hoaxes, almost like an endless loop. Do I have that right?

KY: Yeah. I think the hoax, like I said, makes use of race, but I also think race is a version of the hoax, in that it’s something that’s not real, but is something pretending to be true. That doesn’t mean that racism has effects, quite the contrary. I mean, that’s what’s even more pernicious about it, and even by the stereotypes you see used by it.

DL: Since your writing and the publishing of this book, have your views changed in any way?

KY: Ha! Not really, I mean, if anything, I see the ways, say, the Russian bots make use of this kind of very thing, they are often pretending to be worse than things are, and also, make use of the very selfsame divisions that I was talking about in my book.

DL: What was your original motivation for writing the book?

KY: I saw people talking about hoaxes, which were infinitely interesting, but I did feel like they didn’t seem to understand what hoaxes were really about. Instead, they spent a lot of time talking about, thought they were about, the blurry line between fact and fiction, or somehow were just joking when, in fact, they were quite serious in their use of these stereotypes, but also, in what else they were getting up to buy.

DL:I see. I see. You mention in the acknowledgments, this [book] started as something from a personal experience and expanded into this research-heavy result. Can you describe how that developed?

KY: Yeah, I had written my first book, The Grey Album (2012), which was very much about black culture and tracing it from slavery to the present, and from the negro-spirituals to hip-hop, and in that, I was thinking about improvisation and what I ended up calling “storying,” in many ways the good side of lying, and then, I really started thinking a lot about the bad side of lying, and partially that was because I realized it wasn’t all fun and games, especially in terms of the hoax, which seemed quite different than this idea of “storying” even.

DL: Interesting.

KY: But also, I knew a hoaxer, and so, there was a kind of trying to write about that, as well.

DL:Yeah, are you referring to Ravi Desai?

KY: Yeah.

DL:The style of the book is what I would call “interlaced” or “fluid.” It moves from one hoax to another, then another, and then you tie all of that to your larger themes. Again, was this a result of conscious planning or did it just come out that way?

KY: Well, I tried to weave in and tell a story that was a kind of history, but also, that reflected on the present. So, once I realized that [P.T.] Barnum was going to start the book, which took a while, I then realized, also, what was interesting about Barnum was the way he reflected on today, and then, things I’d been writing about for six years suddenly became super-relevant. I’d been writing about fake journalism and the ways such fakery could be dangerous, and then suddenly the term “fake news” was everywhere. But the book was already finished and was actually coming out, so it was just fortuitous, but also I hope, a little forward-looking in it’s approach.

DL:As I mentioned, this book really affected me. It changed the way I see so many things. I have trouble, now, experiencing anything without questioning my own assumptions and even the intent of the person or object of art with which I’m interacting. What kind of reaction were you expecting from readers?

KY: I don’t know. I mean, I’ve been pleased by peoples’ reactions. They seem to respond to it and understand the history, but also, the present day of it and the way it’s pointing out both. I think that’s important and was really pleasing to see.

DL:Were there any surprises you got from the reactions, anything that has come up?

KY: No, not so much. People tend to find other hoaxes, and that’s kind of interesting.

DL:The poetry world has experienced a lot of hoaxes, you cite several in the book. Is that often a subject of discussion in your role as the Poetry Editor at The New Yorker?

KY: No, not really. I hope got all those hoaxes cleared out.

DL:Ha! Good! And so, looking forward, how do we as a country cope with this continuing tradition of the hoax in all its guises and the underlying assumptions about race, gender, and identity, in general?

KY: Yeah, I think it’s an interesting moment, because I think that on the one hand, people are quite cynical and believe everything’s kind of hoaxing, and I think that only leads to more hoaxes. I think that it’s better to be skeptical and questioning, a little bit, but also to trust as much as you can, while evaluating. It’s a hard balance to strike, because I feel like, you definitely see the ways that people reject this idea of there being truth, which leads to more and more hoaxes, or even worse, that “everything’s hoaxed, everyone’s faking.” My fear is that we’re in this half-hoax world, and that’s dangerous.

DL:You’re focused on non-fiction and memoir [in your book], but I’m wondering if you could talk about the hoax’s role vis-à-vis fiction. You mention that a lot of these hoaxes “render reality two-dimensional, like our screens,” and I’m wondering if that plays into the depiction of characters in fiction.

KY: Well, I think the danger of the hoax is that it doesn’t just threaten the truth, but also fiction and our ability to admit that we’re moved by things that aren’t real, which I think is very important. One of the things I think contemporary fiction is doing, quite interestingly, is playing with the idea of autobiography, and people sometimes talk about “autofiction.” In that way, it actually goes back to the beginnings of fiction, which often pretended to be autobiography, and here you have people writing autobiography almost pretending to be fiction. I think that’s really interesting, but I also think it’s a world away from hoaxing, and I tried to make that clear in the book.

DL:I think that was clear, but I’m curious how a fiction writer deals with a lot of these hoax-related assumptions we make about people in our society.

KY: The writers I like are thinking about these divisions and problems, anyway, someone like Jesmyn Ward, or my friend, Colson Whitehead. They’re writing beautifully about race in America, and sometimes they’re telling ghost stories, and sometimes they’re using fantasy. I think they’re engaging the full range of imagination in order for us to understand and imagine life in its fullness. And so, if anything, it means you have to be better at that, and you can’t just rely on notions that feel kind of true. Writers I know are much bolder than that, in creating worlds, but also helping us to understand this one.

DL:Is there anything else, last call, something on your mind you’d like to share?

KY: I’m struck over and over again by the way the hoax is political, and I’m trying to understand that, the way the hoax takes that up, and it can almost become a form of propaganda, and that’s what’s important to fight against.

Kevin Young is director of The New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and poetry editor of The New Yorker. His latest work of nonfiction, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, was longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award.

Darren Lyons is currently receiving his MFA in Poetry from The New School. His work is featured or forthcoming in Chronogram, Stonesthrow Review, on The Best American Poetry Blog and InquisitiveEater.com. Find him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/darren.lyons.984.

Pune Dracker, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Edmund Gordon about his book, The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography (Oxford University Press), which is among the final five selections in the category of Biography for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

“Writers continue to be invented and reinvented by their readers, long after their own last words on the matter,” writes Edmund Gordon in his meticulously researched literary biography of the extraordinary English novelist, short story writer and journalist Angela Carter, who died from lung cancer in 1992.

An earth mother with “hurricane hair,” a “white witch” known for her feminism and magical realism, one of the most important English writers of the last century? Yes, yes, and so much more, as Gordon paints a lively, intimate portrait of this unconventional woman and her unconventional, chance-taking work.

Pune Dracker: Why were you so compelled to debunk the myth of Angela Carter as a “white witch?”

Edmund Gordon: I suppose mainly because I wanted to do a sort of Carteresque job on Carter. She described herself as being “in the demythologizing business,” and aimed to unpick the myths of modern life, including the various myths of gender identity, and to expose some of the cultural forces that had led to their construction. As I started to realize the extent to which her own life and character had become tangled up in mythology, I felt almost duty-bound to address it. But I also think that “demythologizing” is one of the things that any decent literary biography should be trying to do – it’s one of the things that the form can do really well.

PD: The details, the breadth of material in this book... astounding! How did you research it?

EG: My process varied hugely over the five years I was working on the book. I began by re-reading all of Angela Carter’s published books; I then read through all of her journals, and all of the letters of hers that are archived in the British Library. Next, I set about interviewing as many of the people who’d known her as I could, and along the way I discovered new caches of letters, and new people to interview. So the first couple of years were mainly spent in research, and that phase was enormous fun—I did a lot of traveling, and I got to hang out with some really fascinating people.

PD: What about the writing and organizing?

EG: I didn’t do much writing during that initial phase – the odd paragraph here and there, but no sustained passages. My ideas for how to structure the book were constantly changing, and I was accumulating almost unmanageably vast amounts of material. A writer friend recommended a computer program called Scrivener, and I used that to order some of my notes. I’d recommend it to anyone who’s writing a big, research-heavy nonfiction book.

Towards the end of the second year, although there were still big gaps in my research, I decided I’d better start writing. I had the idea by this stage that I was going to write 25 chapters of 5,000 words each. Most ended up being quite longer, but it was definitely useful to have that word-count in mind—it meant that I could think of each chapter as a discrete and manageable unit. I could kid myself that I wasn’t in fact writing a 500-page book, which was too imposing a thing to contemplate!

I spent most days after that just getting words on the page, addressing various technical challenges, trying different things out and seeing what worked. I do think that with any kind of writing, it’s impossible to concentrate on the micro and the macro at once—you can’t keep the overall structure in mind while attending to individual sentences—but as a basic principle of composition, I tried to make sure that everything in the book was relevant to the main narrative arc, which is about how Angela Carter became Angela Carter, and how she came to write the books she did.

PD: How would you describe your voice in, or writerly approach to, this book?

EG: There’s currently a great vogue for biographies that take the form of an authorial quest, but I didn’t want to thrust myself into the foreground—I was conscious of how irritated a reader interested in Angela Carter might become if they found themselves wading through long passages about some guy they’ve never heard of. As a man writing about a feminist icon, that felt particularly urgent. At the same time, I thought that there were interesting things that had happened during my research – both to me, and to her friends and family – they became part of the story I had to tell. I made the decision to put all that stuff into my epilogue. Anyone who isn’t interested in what happened after Angela Carter died is free to close the book at that stage.

That said, I think that the book is inevitably steeped in my voice and my point of view. On every page you’re making decisions about how to narrate a certain incident, or how to interpret a certain passage, or which details to include and which to leave out. My rule of thumb was never to allow myself to speak without interruption for more than a paragraph or two at a time. I wanted the book to have a sort of polyphonic quality – lots of voices, agreeing and disagreeing with one another, in order to fashion a composite portrait that I think is inevitably richer and more nuanced than a single perspective can ever be.

PD: You beautifully illustrated your theme of “invention” by showing connections between the characters and plot in Carter’s work and experiences that happened in “real” life. Did you draw this fact/fiction roadmap solely by reading her journals and letters and published works? What criteria did you use to determine how relevant/strong a connection was?

EG: There were several instances in which she flagged up a connection for me, such as the one between the world of The Magic Toyshop and the psychological environment of her childhood, which she spoke about quite frequently in interviews; if she did that, I tended to feel I was on pretty solid ground. In other cases, such as the parallel between the short story “Flesh and the Mirror” and the incident with the Summer Child in Chapter 12, the similarities between events described in her letters or journals and ones described in her fiction were just too close to ignore. There were a few times when I saw some connection between the life and the work, and laid the evidence out without making a big fuss, and allowed my readers to make up their own minds.

PD: You write that “All of Angela Carter’s books are about performance and self-invention.” As the book contains so many juicy passages from her journal, I began to wonder if she wrote them as if someone were reading. Is there something to the fact that she stopped keeping one after she was diagnosed with cancer?

EG: I think she probably stopped keeping a journal after she was diagnosed with cancer just because she was exhausted from her treatment – she’d been keeping one far less frequently since the birth of her son in 1983 anyway. She certainly did perform for putative readers in her journal though. There’s a moment in the 1960s when she actually says: “Shit, I’m writing this for the reader over my shoulder.” And when she got ill she had the opportunity to destroy all her journals: the fact that she didn’t suggests she wasn’t averse to the idea of a biographer or someone else reading them at some stage.

At the same time, the way in which she writes in her journal is palpably different – more private, more open to acknowledging her darker thoughts and desires – than the ways in which she wrote letters. I think she was performing a certain version of selfhood in the journals, but it’s a different and more private version than the one she performed in public. (She very much believed that the self only really existed in performance – that there was no such thing as an essential inner self.)

PD: Your first introduction to Carter’s work was The Magic Toyshop. What would you recommend as a first read for aspiring writers, and what should we take notice of?

EG: I think that her journalism – collected as Shaking a Leg – is consistently extraordinary. Taken as a whole, it functions as one of the most intimate and intelligent accounts of late 20th century Britain in print, as well as a riveting intellectual autobiography. Aspiring writers should look to it as example of how to modulate a voice: the way that she’s able to be angry and funny in the course of a single paragraph, even a single sentence, and to remain brilliantly stylish all the while, is enviable. In terms of fiction, I’d recommend the short stories collected in The Bloody Chamber, which show just how much variety a writer of genius can squeeze out of familiar narrative modes, and Nights at the Circus, especially for the characterization of Fevvers, who must be one of the liveliest and most amusing creations in an English novel since the death of Dickens.

PD: I was struck by the relationships and alliances Carter made with other writers and artists. Could you speak to some of these and reiterate what they meant to her?

EG: When Angela Carter started publishing novels in the mid-1960s, she cut a very lonely figure in the English literary landscape. The only writer who was at all like her was Anthony Burgess, and he was her first real literary ally. Their relationship played out mainly via letters – they only met one another a handful of times. It wasn’t until she returned to England from Japan in 1972 that she really became part of a literary scene. By then the English novel was dramatically changing – becoming more interested in imaginative and linguistic exuberance, and beginning to look outwards, to other cultures – and she formed very close friendships with a number of writers and editors, including Salman Rushdie, Carmen Callil, Lorna Sage, Kazuo Ishiguro and Neil Jordan. These friendships meant the world to her. They allowed her to feel like she had a certain status, as well as a decent number of allies, within the world of letters.

PD: As you delved into Carter’s life, what most surprised you about her?

EG: In terms of her personality, I was surprised by her lack of self-confidence in some respects. The sense of intellectual self-confidence that comes off her books is so powerful that it was a shock to discover that she was often socially insecure, and that as a young woman she had a very negative perspective on her own appearance.

PD: You created such an intimate and lively/lovely portrait of Carter—I feel like I know her having read the book, so I can only imagine how you felt, thinking and writing about her for more than 5 years. How do you describe that relationship? Was finishing the book like a sort of break-up?

EG: More like a bereavement. I found the last chapter – in which I describe her illness and death – incredibly difficult to write (although in terms of structure and material it’s one of the most straightforward in the book). The relationship between biographer and subject is very weird: You get to know this person so intimately, better than you know most of your friends and family (better in some respects than you know yourself), and yet the influence and attachment can occur in only one direction. You can’t speak to them, you can’t ask them anything. And yet you end up dreaming about them most nights. For many years Angela Carter was like my imaginary friend, always there in my head, and I did feel quite lonely after I finished the book.

PD: Bonus question for ailurophiles: I’m not sure I can work this one in, but I really need to know: Mr. Cat, the Siamese who lived next door to Angela when she was in Japan, had two tails?!

EG: So she claimed…

Edmund Gordon studied philosophy at Trinity College Dublin and English literature at University College London, and since 2011 has been a lecturer in English at King's College London. A regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, he has also written for a variety of other publications in Britain and the US, including Bookforum and The Guardian.

Pune Dracker works as a writer and editor in the animal welfare field and is studying nonfiction at the New School. She runs, dances and blogs at ssspunerisms.com, and is a regular contributor to the weekly podcast House of Pride Radio.

Sam Inshassi, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Thi Bui about her book, The Best We Could Do (Abrams), which is among the final five selections in the category of Autobiography for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

I first met Thi Bui at a panel discussing the graphic novel form at BookCon last year. I didn’t know who she was, but I was compelled by her narrative and bought her illustrated memoir, The Best We Could Do, which tells the story of one family’s journey growing up in war-torn Vietnam and starting a new life in America, focusing on the relationships that form between parents and children. When I crack the spine of my book, I see the message she wrote me when she signed it: “Best of luck with your religion + sex story!” I had a feeling even then we would be kindred spirits, and I couldn’t have been more right. Bui’s memoir is raw, emotional, complicated, and so real. And upon speaking with her, I was reaffirmed in my belief that certain human experiences, like being an immigrant, a refugee, or just Other, are universal.

Bui’s next project will be about climate change through the lens of farmers in Vietnam. And in May, you can find her comic journalism piece on Southeast Asian deportation at TheNib.com.

Sam Inshassi: I was wondering where you would go next after your wonderful memoir, The Best We Could Do? I hope it won’t be another 10 years before we get to see it!

Thi Bui: I hope not! First off, I will never do another memoir again. And two, that’s my goal, not to take so long. Trying to do journalism is like a deliberate push to work faster. But it’s kind of an oxymoron when you do comic journalism because comics take so long to produce, but they’re not actually very good at communicating information that needs to go out quickly—and trying to figure out how you do long-form journalism that really goes into a subject and uses comics to help.

SI: I would say that the comic form is really conducive to that because you have the imagery that can really compliment your message so you can say less and somehow get more across. One of the things I actually wanted to talk about was that, in your memoir you give me such good education around Vietnam, like I actually now have a history about Vietnam and the Vietnam War that I never properly got at school, and in a way that’s resonant, that I understand.

TB: Cool! Good. That’s the high school teacher in me.

SI: What I liked was that it was a perfect marriage, that it didn’t get in the way of your parent’s narrative, but it also wasn’t hiding in the background either. From a craft perspective, as a writer myself, I really thought that came together quite beautifully and made your book a valuable resource in that sense. I wonder how you thought about putting those piece together and laying it out in the way you did?

TB: My brain is very abstract and full of, I don’t know, symbols, like water. My outline for myself for the book was like, I have a very abstract idea about water for every chapter, so my book was really not so much about plot but how each chapter was going to feel. In retrospect, I don’t know how my publisher ever agreed to do the book. I guess I had to do a lot of explaining. There was a lot of back and forth with the editor. I had a lot of material from interviews with my parents. And I’ve always thought about people giving oral history. But I guess, securing feedback from American readers early on, in the early chapters—they’d get confused about who was who, and is this Bo, or was it his grandfather, or was it his father? Just confusion about so many different characters made me realize that, just storytelling-wise, there needed to be a central protagonist that could anchor the story and help the readers through. That I had to anchor myself. And that’s how it became more of a memoir. I’m always so embarrassed about the idea that it’s a memoir.

SI: You said you’re embarrassed about it?

TB: Yeah, yeah. Just because there’s a notion that a memoir is you sitting down to write about all the great things you did, and that is so not this story at all! It’s just me scratching my head for 10 years over the questions that I had.

SI: In your preface, and in interviews I’ve heard you speak, you talk about the many years and iterations this book has passed through before becoming what it is now. What made you start the project to begin with? What first compelled you to track your family history? I know you talk in the book about your first trip back to Vietnam. Was that the main impetus?

TB: Well, actually, I took the opportunity to start it when I was doing my Master’s final project at NYU. It was about breaking down what I saw as really bad representations of Vietnamese people and narratives about the Vietnam War, so looking at specifically American narratives. There were all the bad Vietnam War movies that I’d grown up with, and then even looking further into scholarship about the Vietnam War, what I was finding a lot of was just very American-centric perspectives. And then even the ones that tried to not be American-centric did a very naive thing, which was to then go talk to the enemy, and then that was what people thought of as the Vietnamese experience. And I was like, hello! There’s a whole diaspora of Vietnamese people who were on another side of that war, so you might, you know, talk to us! And it was just so frustrating that something so simple to me would seem so out of reach for so many American scholars. So I did a whole master’s project around that, and then I also wanted to create something, so I did an oral history with the primary sources that were the closest to me, that I had access to, which meant my family. And my family’s reaction to reading the transcripts of my interviews with them, it got me thinking, you know there’s something to this.

They were so excited, to read their own words in writing and also to read each other’s stories, and to compare stories. They were more excited than they’d been about any kind of art project I’ve ever done before. I felt like this is something worth looking into, something like a book! And I knew that I wanted it to be accessible. I didn’t want to produce a book for academia only. So I thought about comics as a more accessible medium that I had seen done, reading Maus and Persepolis, but I think that it’s probably arrogant for me to think that I could just do that. Because comics are a very, very different thing than writing and drawing, and I had to teach myself to do them very slowly over time.

SI: An interesting thing I observed is that pregnancy plays such a prominent role in this story. You bookend it with the birth or your son, and you also vividly depict each of your mother’s pregnancies. Was this meant to convey a deeper message around birth and rebirth? New life and how it so often seems to be a close cousin to death?

TB: Yeah, I guess. It’s kind of heavy with meanings in there. For me, it was also very physical. Physical experiences have always been very good, for me, as humbling experiences that put you back in your body and also help you connect with other people. And especially when you’re dealing with history and politics and immigrant experience, there’s a lot of academic discourse that can be quite “other-ing” and abstract, so it was important for me to bookend this story with a very typical experience, pretty universal and archetypal, and very physical.

SI: Physical is such an interesting way to think about it. I would never have thought of that. Like I said, my first reaction was this idea of rebirth. Going to a new country and restarting their lives. And in the case of your father, it feels like restarting his life over and over again.

TB: Yeah. Absolutely.

SI: I love the page with the identification pictures. I think I stared at it for probably the longest time of the entire book; it made it so real for me. Was that your intention in placing those photos?

TB: The refugee camp photo is a thing that a lot of people have, still, like it’s a memento of that time. And it’s very, very real. The thing is, I didn’t want to introduce us with those photos. It was important for me to figure out the exact moment to reveal it. And I think that’s actually what makes it emotional for people—they spent the greater part of the book not seeing refugee photos. That was me thinking about how we encounter refugees today. We see the refugee photos first. We see them on a boat escaping from Syria or looking very impoverished in a refugee camp, and I think while those photos are meant to pull at our heartstrings, they also can divorce the person from their entire history. So you only see that person as a refugee and not the person that they were their whole lives up until that moment.

SI: Yes, that is exactly right. I think about that a lot as well. Similar to that idea, you made a conclusion at the end, which actually kind of jarred me a little bit, and I’d love to hear little more about your take on it. At the end you conclude that with the tumultuous history of Vietnam as it is, you couldn’t really call the country your homeland. Now, I’m of Palestinian heritage and that was very jarring for me because Palestinians will always call historic Palestine home, no matter how messy it is, and it’s incredibly messy! So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about what brought you to that conclusion. What does that mean to you when you say that?

TB: You know, I think if the history of Vietnam had just been the history of Vietnamese people fighting against colonizers, then I’d definitely still call it my homeland even if I’d moved away for whatever reason, but because it was a civil war that ultimately tore it apart—a civil war that was made a lot worse by the Cold War and a proxy war, of course—but the fact that it was my own people who butchered each other really tears me up. And there’s a reconciliation that I yearn for, between both sides, and that includes the people who were really not about hiding at all but just trying to survive living in a country that was torn apart by civil war. I don’t know, I’m interested in healing. I’m interested in the diaspora being able to connect with Vietnam as it currently is rather than living in a forever fantasy world based on nostalgia.

SI: Yeah that makes sense. So then I wonder what would you call home now?

TB: Well yeah, I don’t know. I’ve worked so hard at fighting for my right to be an American. I’ve always invested a lot in community organizing and being a public school teacher, and just trying to make my immediate community better and being involved in social justice work here in the U.S. I really do feel like an American in all those ways. Culturally, I’m more complicated than that. But I think that maybe a good move into the future, we need more Americans who are culturally really complicated and have personal motivations to understand world politics, because there are lots of problems coming our way that don’t affect borders, like climate change for example. So I suppose I’m leaning towards the idea of being a sort of global citizen.

Thi Bui was born in Vietnam and immigrated to the United States as a child. She studied art and law and thought about becoming a civil rights lawyer, but became a public school teacher instead. Bui lives in Berkeley, California, with her son, her husband, and her mother. A Different Pond by Bao Phi, illustrated by Thi Bui, was named a 2018 Caldecott Honor Book. The Best We Could Do is her debut graphic novel.

Sam Inshassi is a fiction writer currently pursuing her MFA at the New School. Her work focuses on cultural and identity politics, both in the home and beyond, tapping into her own identity as a first-generation Palestinian Arab-American Muslim female. She’s a passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause and immigrant and refugee rights. You can find her on Twitter @saminshassi.

Daniel Benhamu, on behalf of Creative Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Camille T. Dungy about her book, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton), which is among the final five selections in the category of Criticism for the 2017 NBCC Awards.

Daniel Benhamu: Considering that you are primarily a poet, Guidebook to Relative Strangers is your debut book of essays. It is my understanding that this book originally started out as a memoir, and transformed into a sort of traveling journal of your career as a writer and new role as a mother in the first few years of your daughter’s life. Was this outcome the direction you were always headed toward?

Camille T. Dungy: This book started the same way all my books do: I was curious about the world in which I found myself at a particular moment, and I started taking notes. These notes seemed to want to be organized in the manner you read now in Guidebook to Relative Strangers. I didn’t sit down one day and say, “I’m going to write a memoir.” I can’t imagine going about things like that, though I imagine there are writers who could.

I was keeping notes about my experiences traveling as a black woman and also about my experiences becoming a mother. I was working towards a deeper understanding of what was being revealed to me about who I was and who I was becoming, and also about who we were as a nation. These notes began to overlap and speak to each other and, after a lot of hours at the desk, the book’s path began to reveal itself to me.

DB: What was edited out of it?

CTD: I initially thought that I was writing a book that explored motherhood. That was the new thing in my life at the time that I thought was the most interesting. I’ve been a black woman in America for several decades, and so my understanding of what it means to be black in America hasn’t really changed. The book does explore motherhood, but being a mother changed my approach toward my writing, my communities, and the world at large.

My daughter expanded my sense of commitment to hope, to possibility, and to actively working to build strengthening connections between vulnerable communities. To write about motherhood meant writing about why and how this was. I became more aware than ever of our vulnerability, so to write about motherhood meant to write about the past and present traumas that my black daughter and I must live with every day. This awareness of vulnerability is partly due to the presence of my child in my life, certainly, but it is also due to the awareness cultivated as a result of living a politically, historically, and environmentally conscious life for all these years. The edits in the book were about how I directed my attention, and my readers’.

DB: What was the most difficult part of the transition from poetry to essays for you, and how did you triumph?

CTD: This wasn’t a difficulty I faced when writing this book, but when I first turned my attention to writing prose it would take me an impossibly long time to finish anything once I’d gotten past the first 5 pages. This was because I wanted to start every new writing day as I might with a poem. I would read everything I’d written thus far before I started the next new word. So, if I’d written a lot of pages, I’d find that I would spend my whole writing time rereading rather than writing forward.

With this project, I was constantly taking notes as I moved through the world. I journaled regularly on my trips around the country, and I found myself taking notes on a lot of the follow-up research that came out of things I discovered on those trips. I journaled about my daughter and the ways she was influencing how I saw the world and how the world saw me. While I was gathering the notes that would eventually develop into the essays in Guidebook to Relative Strangers, I employed the attention to every word I’ve trained as a poet, but I figured out ways that I could productively concentrate my attention on writing new lines to keep the energy moving forward.

DB: You talk about language as a home. In essence, you have given your daughter, Callie, a place to live for the ages. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?

CTD: At one point in the book, I wrote about the fine line between hearing a dog’s master say sic her versus it girl. There was a bully in my elementary school who liked to use his Dobermans to intimidate me. I learned about the fine line between those two commands at a very young age.

Language is the seat of so much power and, like all power, we get to decide whether we use it for good or ill. I can’t remember a time I haven’t known that. Perhaps because, as a black woman, I have always known how common it is for language to be used against me. I think I have also always known about this power because I have found great joy in language, in writing and speaking and thinking about the many things words can do to make the world a more beautiful and loving place. I would make it past that bully and his Dobermans and walk into a house where someone said, “I love you, beautiful.” I’ve always known that language can do revolutionary work in this world.

DB: In my opinion, the design of your research process would be a great assignment for students to learn about how to form an inquiry and to share what defines how they are positioned in society today. I see this work as a perfect example of what everyone should try to write for him or herself. I believe that the world would be a better place if everybody did so. Do you see this work as a potential resource to teach young children about how to compose historical ethics

CTD: I am honored that you feel this way about the book. I would be delighted to know that the book proved to be a resource for young people. I am equally delighted when grownups tell me that they learned things from what I’ve written in Guidebook to Relative Strangers. I am as tied to history as I am to the present. My sister is a historian; both my parents are history buffs. This sense that the past is alive and electric was a part of my upbringing I’ve decided not to escape. I am always curious about how we got to where we are today, and what the past can teach us about who we might become. I am willing to put the work in to dig up answers about the ways that where we have been has shaped where we are going. Thinking in this way seems to be crucial to thinking in an informed and honest manner about who I am in this world, who we all might be.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry: Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), Smith Blue (Southern Illinois UP, 2011), Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010), and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006). Her debut collection of personal essays is Guidebook to Relative Strangers (W. W. Norton, 2017). Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, 2009), co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology (Persea, 2009), and served as associate editor for Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade(University of Michigan Press, 2006). Her honors include an American Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and a California Book Award silver medal.

Daniel Benhamu is an award-winning actor, writer, and filmmaker. He has produced both film and theater. His most notable performance was an autobiographical one-man show. He is transliterating the spine of that play into a memoir. He will soon graduate with a MFA in Nonfiction Writing from The New School. Find him on Instagram, Twitter, or the book of face @danimalbenhamu, or on his website: www.danielbenhamu.com.